Richie Havens: “How I Play in Open D”

In 1987, Havens Detailed His Unique Approach

When Jimi Hendrix returned to America in 1967 in advance of his breakthrough performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival, he spent his first day in New York City. Brushing off his jetlag, that evening he took his entourage to see Richie Havens perform in Greenwich Village. “He’s worth listening to hard,” Jimi advised.

Their playing styles couldn’t have been further apart, but their friendship ran deep. While in London, Hendrix had created a groundbreaking approach to heavily amplified electric guitar. Havens specialized in strumming percussive rhythm on a Guild acoustic. He usually played open-D tuning and often fretted with just his thumb coming over the top of the guitar’s neck. Havens’s deep, resonate voice, first heard by the record-buying public on his 1966 Mixed Bag album, was just as distinctive.

As the 1960s progressed, Havens continued to release brilliant albums, play concerts, and perform at festivals. In 1969, for instance, he opened the Woodstock festival with jaw-dropping performances of “Freedom” and “Handsome Johnny.” As the decades progressed, he branched into advertising, voicing McDonald’s, Amtrak, and United Way commercials.

A Havens fan since my early teens, I welcomed the chance to interview him about his unique approach guitar playing. Here’s our July 22, 1987, conversation, a heavily edited portion of which was published in the October 1987 Guitar Player.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to focus most of the interview on your unique guitar style.

No problem.

How did you get started playing?

Well, I wanted to play guitar badly when I discovered that there was a possibility of maybe having fun singing onstage in Greenwich Village, too, after leaving Brooklyn, where I used to sing on the street corners, for the most part—just doo-wop type stuff, neighborhood groups. I decided to go to Greenwich Village. There was a bunch of folksingers down there at the time, and they were singing mostly all traditional music. There were hardly any singer/songwriters around; the beatniks were still there. That’s basically what it was.

How did you discover open D?

There was a chord that they used to sing in the church group—gospel singers, basically. Used to be five guys, and they had one guitar player. He used to play a chord, and they used to tune up to it vocally. So I used that chord that he used to play, which turned out to be a D chord. It’s in an E chord structure, but in the key of D [the strings are pitched D, A, D, F#, A, D, from low to high].

So you tuned some of your strings down.

Yes, I tuned down to the key of D, but it’s the structure of the E chord if you played it normally.

What’s the appeal of that chord?

It was just naturally what I felt at the time. But I think that the difference between my guitar playing and others is that I’m always playing six strings, no matter what.

You seem to fret most everything with your thumb over the top of the neck.

Mm-hmm. Practically everything—99% worth.

Then you must do a variation on the open tuning to get the minor.

Yes, I do. Sometimes I tune it to a minor for certain songs. I tune down the G string. Sometimes I tune to a minor seventh, which is tuning down the high-E as well.