Nobody does cover songs with more passion or respect for the artist's original intent than folk icon Richie Havens, and on Nobody Left To Crown, his newest CD, the soulful singer/singwriter offers up a couple of interesting reinterpretations of Jackson Browne's "Lives in the Balance" and "The Great Mandela," a song written by Peter, Paul and Mary's Peter Yarrow.

Havens' approach to singing covers isn't the standard "hey, wouldn't it be fun to play such and such, that'd be a gas" karaoke lark that most become. More than that, he's not interested in recreating them in his own image.  That would be akin to blasphemy.

"I don't ever think I'm making anything into Richie Havens songs (laughs)," says Havens. "For me, it's like, God, [those artists have] pushed me again. I feel this wonderful energy of information that comes from these songs, and that... you know, the songs that I cover, people who would sit who would be on the outside of this knowledge would not know that I'm not singing just to cover them because I might think that I could sing them. But I was singing them in order for me to express what the writer had given to me hearing that song. And all the songs that I've covered are songs that the writers were very important in in terms of they were living in the same world I was. There were many ways to see the center, and all of these people contributed to that in me. So, I never really think about that, you know?"

Nobody Left To Crown is an interesting title, considering the state of the world presently. If it were anybody else but Havens, you'd think calling it that would indicate a high degree of pessimism about our leaders. That's not it at all, according to Havens.

"No, actually ... it really doesn't," says Havens. "It meant there's nobody left to crown except ourselves for being able to survive the craziness that they put us through when they jammed us underground. It was great for Woodstock to occur because it brought us above ground and they couldn't hide us."

Going back to the days when he left doo-wop behind to immerse himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, Havens remembers how he took pride in introducing to the world around him songs that affected him deeply from people he greatly respected.

"For me, that privilege to be able to sing for people songs that they wouldn't have heard in their lives had they not passed Greenwich Village at the time, and the people who were singing them were very, very professional," says Havens. "And then, what they did, from Peter, Paul and Mary to Fred Neil to Joan Baez to all these singers that had some sense of where their concerns all came together. We called it protest music, although it wasn't really protest music. It was songs that had been sung by folk people all throughout the ages. These happened to be singer-songwriters of our age at that point, using that system to sing the songs necessary for us in our time."

More of our interview with Havens will appear in a future issue of Goldmine. Meanwhile, get caught up with all that Havens is doing by going to www.richiehavens.com