By James Straub

It has been nearly 40 years since Richie Havens mesmerized more than a half a million music lovers, who had converged in Bethel, N.Y., for the 1969 Woodstock festival.

Image courtesy of Madison House

Havens opened the three-day music fest that has endured as a defining moment of the ’60s and its characteristic cry for social and political change.

When he takes the stage next month at the Downeast Properties Music and Arts Festival at Flye Point, his audience will be less than 5,000 strong, but Havens’ poignant and timeless singing style likely will electrify the crowd as it has for four decades.

On his latest album, “Grace of the Sun,” Havens covers the Joni Mitchell classic, “Woodstock.” The song was a hit for Mitchell and also for Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Havens also included “All Along the Watchtower” on “Grace of the Sun,” his 26th album, released in March.

Bob Dylan wrote “All Along the Watchtower.” A version done by Jimi Hendrix is said to be the “definitive interpretation” of the song. Hendrix closed the Woodstock Festival.

None of this is coincidence, nor is it simply a revival of or a tribute to music four decades old.

Havens, as well as the songs he writes and performs, is as meaningful today as he was when he first emerged in Greenwich Village in the early ‘60s.

“The main message has always been the same,” Havens said in a recent interview when asked about including “Woodstock” on his latest album. “That concert in 1969 was the beginning of the world. As a generation growing up in the ‘50s, we were the last to hear ‘speak when you’re spoken to.’”

He said that as his generation moved away from the “speak when you’re spoken to” mentality, they had to scream, and “that was rock ‘n’ roll.”

Havens insists that growing up in the ‘50s and coming of age in the ‘60s was “a definite education, politically and socially.”

“And we’re still on that case,” he said. “Not much has changed in Washington.”

Havens said he started with a list of songs to do that he had collected over the years when he planned “Grace of the Sun.”

“Songs written by others become a part of me,” he said. “It’s a kind of continuum for me.”

He had never performed “Woodstock,” but always loved the versions done by Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash, he said.

While in the studio working on “Grace of the Sun,” he said the Crosby, Stills and Nash version was “singing in my head for three days.”

“It must be time to do it because it means so much to everyone,” he decided.

Havens emerged from the fertile folk scene in Greenwich Village in the early ‘60s, but his start in music came a decade earlier when he and his friends sang doo-wop on the street corners of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

“Guys could come together, sing together and become lifelong friends,” Havens said of his doo-wop days, which occupied much of his attention from the time he was 14 until he was 19.

“I gave up show business when I stopped singing doo-wop,” he said. “That was show business.”

With that, Havens entered the “communications business,” which is how he describes the politically and socially charged music he has produced over the years.

The transformation took place in Greenwich Village.

Havens said he and his doo-wop buddies were derided as beatniks in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“We were called beatniks, and we didn’t know what it was,” he said. “So, I crossed the bridge to Manhattan to find out. It turned out to be poets and artists that had something to say.”

Eventually, Havens would take the stage to read poetry with Allen Ginsberg Jack Kerouac.

“It was an empowering thing,” Havens said of his introduction to the village, which included reading poetry, painting portraits, and listening to folk singers throughout the night.

“I heard so many songs,” he said. “I started singing those songs. That changed my life.”

Freddy Neil was among the folk singers who influenced Havens.

“I’d go see Freddy Neil and I’d sing along all night,” Havens said. “One night, he said, ‘Hey, I’ve been hearing you sing these songs with me for a year. Here’s a guitar; take it home and learn to sing songs yourself.’

“That changed my life in four days. I went on stage at the Hootenanny and never got off in seven years.”

When he recorded his first album in 1967, he was making it for the people who had listened to him perform in Greenwich Village for seven years, he said.

In 1968, he went on the road, playing six days a week for seven years. For the past 28 years, he has continued to tour, playing weekends year-round.

The messages in the songs he writes and in those he sings by other writers are universal.

“From the beginning, it’s all about relationships,” he said.

The relationships can be men-to-men, men-to-women, men-to-God, men-to-nature, parents-to-children and so on, he said.

“I sing about relationships to cover the human basis that we actually live — the commonness to us all,” he said.

Havens readily acknowledges that he was privileged to be in Greenwich Village singing songs that changed his life, and he finds encouragement in the work of today’s youth.

“Everywhere I go, local performers are carrying the ball as much as we did then, singing songs that matter to them, saying what they want to say about the world,” he said. “It’s been a great continuum.”