Beverly Bivens
We Five's first single, from their debut album of the same name, was a reworked version of Sylvia Tyson's song "You Were On My Mind". It became one of the first folk-rock hits, reaching number three in the "Billboard" "Hot 100" in August 1965. Tyson (then Sylvia Fricker) says that she was unaware that her song had been covered until she heard We Five's version on a car radio while driving on Highway 101 in California. One consequence of We Five's success was that Tyson's song, which, until then, had been unavailable in sheet form, was published by Witmark of New York, with a photograph of Bivens and We Five on the cover. However, with the so-called "British invasion" at its height, We Five's recording had only limited international success, having been covered reluctantly, though successfully, in Britain by Crispian St. Peters.
Beverly Bivens
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 RidgerunnersWefive.net 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.