Songwriting is a sanctuary for Neil Diamond, just as it was when he first put pen to paper as an intense, sensitive teenager at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. Scarcely had he learned his first chords on the guitar his parents gave him as a 16th birthday present than the songs began to pour out of him.

By the time he was in attending New York University, he started spending free hours shopping his songs at the Manhattan music-publishing businesses known collectively as Tin Pan Alley. By the spring of 1962 he had dropped out of college, six months shy of graduation, to seriously pursue songwriting.

The great husband-and-wife songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich (the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron”) heard artist potential in the young man and helped him land a record deal. His major radio breakthrough came in 1966 with “Cherry, Cherry,” the same year his song “I’m a Believer” became a chart-topper for the Monkees. “I’ve been working full-time and making a living at it ever since,” he notes with typical understatement.

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Over four decades and 25 albums, Richie Havens has used his music to convey messages of brotherhood and personal freedom. Cutting his teeth on the fertile ’60s music scene of Greenwich Village and interpreting tunes by Bob Dylan, he gained even more notoriety after opening the Woodstock festival on August 15, 1969.

The festival was off to a shaky start—several hours after the scheduled kickoff time, not a note of music had been played. Organizers convinced Havens to go on stage alone with his guitar and entertain the hundreds of thousands waiting for the music to begin. Each time he tried to finish his set, he found himself being talked into going back out. But after two hours and 45 minutes of playing, Havens ran out of material.

So he improvised. Over the intensely rhythmic strum of his own acoustic, Havens composed a festival-inspired song called “Freedom” on the spot (building on a snatch of the traditional “Motherless Child”). The tune was immortalized in the Woodstock film, and Havens has been performing it ever since. “I feel that it doesn’t belong to me anyway,” he said in 2002. “It belongs to everything that made it come out.”

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“Without a doubt, songwriting is my greatest source of joy and the best outlet for my creativity,” says Dolly Parton, who since penning her first tune at age 5, has published over 3,000 songs, including country classics such as “Put It Off Until Tomorrow,” “Joshua,” “Jolene,” “Coat Of Many Colors,” “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy,” “Touch Your Woman,” “Just Because I’m A Woman,” “The Last One To Touch Me,” “Yellow Roses” and the most successful crossover single of the past three decades, “I Will Always Love You.”

Yet for all this, in the public eye, Dolly the songwriter is regularly eclipsed by all the other Dollys we know and love: legend of country music, platinum recording artist, charismatic stage performer, wisecracking comedienne, star of movies and television, tabloid trash queen, savvy entrepreneur, multi-millionairess, warm-hearted philanthropist and of course, cultural icon. In the ’80s, it was written that Dolly’s image—the cascading blond wigs, the carefully applied make-up and the impossibly pulchritudinous figure—was the most universally recognized of any celebrity, meaning that even farmers in remote regions of Soviet Georgia could smile and say, “Dolly Parton.”

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“Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.”

Beautiful Fool

By Don Henry

Audio MP3

Martin Luther who did you think that you were?
Appointed by some higher up
Merely mortal, your plans were unaffordable
No one wants to pay for love

Oh you beautiful fool
Swimmin up stream, kickin’ up waves
Dreams weren’t meant to come true
That’s why they call ‘em dreams
Oh you beautiful fool

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