49 f Catching The Wind

This issue’s cover star isn’t the only one with a 50-year career landmark, Donovan’s celebrating one too. Steve Hunt hears about his early folk days with Bert Jansch and Derroll Adams.

Roll Hall Of Fame. In recent years, his associations with famous friends like Bob Dylan, Graham Nash, Jimmy Page, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles have fre- quently seen his achievements positioned as a sidebar to the stories of others, and the oft-repeated anecdotes dismissed as mere hubris by those too young to remember his heyday.

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Back in 1965 however, Donovan was what used to be called a folksinger, albeit one with a singularly unusual career path. Still a teenager when catapulted to star- dom, he was awarded an Ivor Novello Award for his debut single (the timelessly lovely Catch The Wind). While his contem- poraries honed their craft in the safe havens of folk clubs, Donovan – subjected to the full glare of the public spotlight –was urg- ing the readers of teen magazines to listen to Bob Davenport & The Rakes.

Time to ask some different questions…

“Hell-oo!” says the unmistakable voice on the telephone, from his home in Ireland. “So… you want me to talk about folk music?” Oh ’deed I do…

“For the first ten years of my life I lived

in Glasgow, where I listened to folk songs at family parties. Each relative would sing a song – aunts, uncles, family friends. A chair would be put in the middle of an empty room at these parties and a slightly tipsy rel- ative or friend would be pushed onto it and asked to sing their song. Many of the songs, though I didn’t know it at the time, were

his year marks Donovan’s 50th anniversary as a recording artist, a half-century in which he’s released hit records and been inducted into the Rock ’n’

folk songs from Ireland and Scotland – we’re talking about The Wild Colonial Boy, Over The Sea To Skye, Mairi’s Wedding, and they were always sung unaccompanied.”

“Also, my father Donald used to read me poetry by rambling poets like Robert Service and WH Davies – who was an English guy who travelled into America and rode the trains during the Depression. When I got my first taste of recorded Ameri- can folk music – Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Jack Elliott and all that good stuff – I found I was listening to things that I’d already heard my father read as poems.”

After the family moved to Hertford- shire, young Don quickly became enam- oured with the new rock’n’roll sounds.

“The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly appealed to me tremendously. Of course, I didn’t know then that the Everly Brothers had an Irish granny too! At fifteen or sixteen I left school and managed to get into a fur- ther education college, and that was the start of becoming completely plugged in to what one would call the ‘bohemian scene’, of St Albans, Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City. That’s when I became aware of the folk scene that was going on at the time. It was jazz first – the New Orleans revival played by Acker Bilk, Ken Colyer and Chris Barber.”

“Somehow, the folk music was starting to influence me and I used to go to the folk club in St Albans, where the visiting singers like Alex Campbell and Jack Elliott played. The guitar was my second instrument, as I played drums first – the jazz groove was what blew me away. My pal Mick Sharman played guitar and he showed me some chords and taught me to play a couple of Hank Williams songs, and I was hooked! Eventual-

ly I was able to borrow a Zenith f-hole guitar from Mick’s girlfriend which was much bet- ter than the guitar I was learning on – a Spanish guitar, but with steel strings. That was a bugger to tune – impossible!”

“I’d started learning a few songs from Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie records, but it wasn’t until I got hold of that Zenith that I started seriously wanting to learn. I first heard Woody Guthrie’s songs from Jack Elliott, and he fascinated me. I saw that he was playing with Derroll Adams and one thing led to another as time went on, and Derroll Adams became a mentor for me. I followed Derroll around – and this is after I’d already made my earliest records. Colours is really influenced by Derroll. Even the way he touched the strings of his banjo fascinated me. He was a student of Zen Bud- dhism, and he played that banjo like a Japanese koto, or something. So I’d sit with him for hours, listening and looking at what he was doing – he taught me a lot.”

Young man with guitar at St. Ives