“…turn the guitar up Mike please….”
Awhile back I took a look at the open D tuning and I’d like to revisit it once more but with a focus upon the idiosyncratic style of seminal folk maestro, icon and messenger Richie Havens; the great and the good – Richie Havens
If there was ever a reason to pick up a guitar and sing, shout, dance or cry Richie Havens must have a thousand of them and his opening performance at the 1969 Woodstock festival in New York is something so inspirational to behold it’s nothing short of a call to arms, the divine fiat heralding the apocalypse, the second coming, the end of time, the hopes and tragedies of the human condition.
As the festival’s first performer, he held the crowd spellbound for nearly three hours (in part because he was told to perform a lengthy set because many artists were delayed in reaching the festival location), and called back for encore after encore. Having run out of tunes, he improvised a song based on the old spiritual “Motherless Child” that became “Freedom”.
At the end of the day when you strum that old guitar box, you have to make it yours and own it; no matter how you play it. SO here`s some more fuel for your fire: Richie Havens basic chord voicings for the open D tuning lifted directly from Richie Havens own website.
And here is all the proof we’ll ever need…Handsome Johnny and Freedom performed live 1969 by Richie Havens..spellbinding!
Cheers,
Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Concord?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with a musket in his hand,
Marching to the Concord war, hey marching to the Concord war.
Hey, look yonder, tell me what you see
Marching to the fields of Gettysburg?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with a flintlock in his hand,
Marching to the Gettysburg war, hey marching to the Gettysburg war.
Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Dunkirk?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with a carbine in his hand,
Marching to the Dunkirk war, hey marching to the Dunkirk war.
Hey, look yonder, tell me what you see
Marching to the fields of Korea?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with an M1 in his hand,
Marching to the Korean war, hey marching to the Korean war.
Hey, look yonder, tell me what you see
Marching to the fields of Vietnam?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with an M15,
Marching to the Vietnam war, hey marching to the Vietnam war.
Hey, look yonder, tell me what you see
Marching to the fields of Birmingham?
It looks like Handsome Johnny with his hand rolled in a fist,
Marching to the Birmingham war, hey marching to the Birmingham war.
Hey, it’s a long hard road, it’s a long hard road,
It’s a long hard road, before we’ll be free.
Hey, what’s the use of singing this song, some of you are not even listening.
Tell me what it is we’ve got to do: wait for our fields to start glistening,
Wait for the bullets to start whistling.
Here comes a hydrogen bomb, here comes a guided missile,
Here comes a hydrogen bomb: I can almost hear its whistle.
