ENCARTE: RICHIE HAVENS

História de “Freedom”, um dos clássicos do sujeito, contada pelo próprio no encarte de “Resumé: the Best Of Richie Havens” (1993):

“‘Freedom’ was spontaneoulsy written on the stage at Woodstock, when I had already been onstage for two hours and 40 minutes, gone offstage eight times, and been told to go back, because no one else was there yet. I’m going, ‘What the heck am I going to sing?’ I looked down at the audience, and I saw that there was something there that we were not talking about yet, and that was that we had already gained our freedom, and we were exercising it by being here together. So I said a few words to the effect that we’re talking about freedom, well, this is freedom: We got it, we’ve already made it. There’s no reason to think it’s something we need to get. And then I just started playing the guitar. And I thought I would play ‘Motherless Child’, because I hadn’t done that song in about eight or 10 years, but first ‘Freedom’ came out, and I started singing that, and then I went into ‘Motherless Child’. In the middle of ‘Motherless Child’ a verse from an old spiritual came back to me, one I used to sing as a kid with a little gospel group in Brooklin, so I worked into that and then went back to ‘Freedom’“.