Beverly Bivens

Bev Bivens
Beverly Bivens with We Five, 1966
Background information
Birth name	Beverly Ann Bivens
Born	April 28, 1946 (1946-04-28) (age 70) Santa Ana, California, U.S.
Genres	Folk rock, avant-garde jazz
Occupation(s)	Singer
Years active	Mid 1960s
Labels	A&M
Associated acts	The Ridgerunners; We Five; Light Sound Dimension; Joshi Marshall

Beverly (Bev) Ann Bivens (born April 28, 1946) was lead singer with the American West Coast folk-rock group We Five from 1965–67. After her marriage to jazz musician Fred Marshall and the break-up of We Five, she sang for a while with the experimental Light Sound Dimension, but, by the late 1960s had largely left the music scene. After many years of relative seclusion, she sang at the opening of an exhibition in San Francisco in 2009. Her son is the saxophonist Joshi Marshall.

Beverly Ann Bivens was born in Santa Ana, California on April 28, 1946. Her father, Charles Walter Bivens (1914–1982), was originally from Arkansas, with pre-revolutionary Welsh antecedents who probably came to America via London, England. Beverly attended Santa Ana High School (attended also by Bill Medley of The Righteous Brothers, as well as members of the Chantays and actress Diane Keaton, who was her contemporary) and Orange Coast Junior College, where she majored in liberal arts.

With the encouragement of her mother, Bivens had developed her singing voice as a child. Around 1963-4, she began performing with Mike Stewart (1945–2002) and Jerry Burgan, who had formed a folk duo at high school and branched out into electronic music with guitarist Bob Jones (died 2013), whom they met at the University of San Francisco. She had been recommended to Mike Stewart by Terry Kirkman, later of The Association, who was then the boyfriend of her sister Barbara. In 1963, she and Glen Campbell, who also played banjo, had performed background vocals on Desert Pete, a recording by the Kingston Trio, of which Stewart's brother John (1939–2008) was a member. With the addition of Pete Fullerton, the new group, initially called the Ridgerunners and, for a while, the Mike Stewart Quintet, became known as We Five. They recorded their first album, the highly eclectic You Were on My Mind, for A&M records in 1965 after Herb Alpert, founder of A&M, heard them at the "hungry i", a folk/night club on Jackson Street in the North Beach area of San Francisco.