Jerry Merrick
American musician
Jerry Merrick was an American folk singer-songwriter. His songs have been recorded by Richie Havens, B.J. Thomas, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Susan Tedeschi.
Merrick is best known for writing "Follow," which appeared on the 1967 Richie Havens LP Mixed Bag (MCA Verve/Folkways), which Rolling Stone called a "Sixties folk epic." Havens also performed the song in concert appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and Carnegie Hall. It has since appeared on the soundtracks of several films.
Merrick also wrote "From the Prison," which Richie Havens recorded for his second studio LP, Something Else Again, released in January 1968. Havens opened his set at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair ("Woodstock") with "From the Prison". Havens was the opening act at Woodstock, so Merrick's song thus has the distinction of being the first song sung at Woodstock.
Merrick went on to record an album of original compositions for Mercury Records, released in 1969. Following this he moved his family away from New York City and teamed up briefly with fellow Mercury artist Kenny Rankin to appear on The Tonight Show and open for Flip Wilson in various venues throughout the US. He later decided to focus on his growing family, eventually leading him to withdraw from the music industry.
Meanwhile, his song "Guess I'll Pack My Things" was recorded by Tom Ghent on his self-titled debut for Bill Cosby's Tetragrammaton Records.
“Jerry Merrick” enters the record as american musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jerry, Merrick and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Jerry Merrick” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Jerry, Merrick and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6184089. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1968 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jerry Merrick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.