enaissance man...it's a term often bandied about, seldom accurately. Dennis Havens would be quick to deny that it applies to him.
     "If I drove Formula One race cars, climbed the occasional Alp, successfully ran for public office, then I might take it seriously," Havens recently said. "As it is, I consider myself merely an entertainer, someone who strives to bring people pleasure with diverting novels and listenable music in several genres."

A little more than that

This disclaimer notwithstanding,  Havens glosses over many events from his colorful and fascinating past. No, he never climbed an Alp, though as a boy he made it to the top of Black Mountain, outside Henderson, Nevada--twice. He never ran for public office, but he was campaign manager for a congressional candidate, in 1978. And if he never made it to NASCAR, he did travel the country in his Austin-Healey Sprite, back in the early sixties.
     Variety and achievement have always been Havens trademarks. He wrote his first march at fourteen, and sat in with the U.S. Navy Band at fifteen. He played euphonium in the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey circus band under the late, legendary Merle Evans, guest-conducted the Palm Beach Symphony in a work of his own. He sang with the Modernaires for two years, and played trombone and bass in Lionel Hampton's and Bobby Sherwood's big bands, and was in bands backing up such Las Vegas favorites as Vic Damone, Martha Raye, the Ritz Brothers, Englebert Humperdinck, Eartha Kitt, and Marguerite Piazza.
     He also  composed and arranged for one of the longest surviving Las Vegas lounge groups, originally known as the Royal Dixie Jazz Band and later as the Sorta Dixie Jazz Band, including what might have been the most unusual Dixie album ever produced, Gypsy Dixie, in which the traditional New Orleans-style jazz form was successfully blended with elements of Gypsy music from such diverse sources as Liszt and Brahms to Hungarian folk melodies--and Havens's rescoring of his own youthful march, "Gypsy Town Parade," composed when he was sixteen!

On the literary front
Dennis Havens made his first attempts at writing novels back in high school, with two "amazingly immature" works, titled Bandmaster and Member of the Clique. "Fortunately for us all," Havens says, "both manuscripts are irretrievably lost."
     His first surviving-though-unpublished novel was Now and Then, a time-travel yarn dating from 1973. Nine years later he wrote Flash Flood Warning, a mystery-suspense thriller now available, with a growing number of his other books, from Xlibris, the premier online publisher; they can be ordered directly from Xlibris, or through such sites as Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com and Borders.
     Dennis Havens lives in Corinth, Mississippi, where he is organizing a band and working on a modern-day Southern mystery novel.