Keef Hartley Band – "Sinnin' for You" (1969)

Saw you on the corner with another man

A woman like you, I just can’t understand

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I introduced you to the most obscure of the 31 bands or individual musicians who performed at Woodstock 50 years ago this month – the Keef Hartley Band.

The Keef Hartley Band’s founder was English drummer Keith Hartley.  (Like Keith Richards, Hartley is known as “Keef” because some Brits pronounce “Keith” that way.

Keith (or "Keef") Hartley

Hartley got his first big break when Ringo Starr left Rory Storm and the Hurricanes to join the Beatles.  (Too bad Ringo didn’t stay where he was and give Hartley a chance to hook up with John, Paul, and George.)

He later played drums for British blues legend John Mayall before putting together the Keef Hartley Band, which released its first album – Halfbreed – just a few months before Woodstock.

Hartley sometimes dressed in a Native American outfit – complete with a full head-dress and war paint.

Here’s he is on the Halfbreed album cover:

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Halfbreed was a big hit in the U.S., but it sold reasonably well for a debut album by an unknown band.

Most of the group’s members had never performed live in the states before following Santana at Woodstock.  It appears that their set was well received, but the band is MIA when it comes to the various versions of the Woodstock documentary that have been released over the years.

According to frontman Miller Anderson, that was because the group’s manager put the kibosh on their performance being filmed:

I remember being back stage [at Woodstock], waiting to go on, when a fella approaches me with a clipboard.  Turns out he’s with the people filming the show, and he starts asking me what numbers we’re doing, where the solos will be, etc.  

Up walks Johnny [Jones, our manager, who] asks what’s going on, then says something like, “Sorry you're not filming my boys without a written contract.” The guy says he doesn’t even know if the film will ever be made, but suggests it could turn out to be a memorable show, so getting it on film could be a wise move.  

Johnny wasn’t having any of it though, so the guy just tears up the notes he’d taken from me, and walks off.

(The opening sentence of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel, is “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”  I think Ford would have revised that sentence if he had lived long enough to hear Miller Anderson’s Woodstock tale.)

The comprehensive 38-CD audio box set released by Rhino Records earlier this summer (see above) does include much of the band’s Woodstock performance.  That made them the very last Woodstock performers to have their music included on a Woodstock album.

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All of the songs that the Keef Hartley Band played at Woodstock were taken from Halfbreed, which was a straight-ahead electric blues album.  

Today we’re featuring the fifth track from the album, “Sinnin’ For You.”  Click here to listen to the studio album version of that song.

“Sinnin’ for You” was part of a 17-minute, 57-second medley that band played at Woodstock.

You can click here to listen to a 30-second sample from the Woodstock performance of that medley.  But if you want to hear the whole thing, it looks like you’re going to have to click here and buy an MP3 album of the entire second day of Woodstock from Amazon for $47.49.  

If that’s a little rich for your blood, the MP3 version of the Halfbreed album is available from Amazon for $9.49 – or you can buy any of the eight individual tracks on that album for only $1.29 each: