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rom hearing songs in the folk club, I used to go to the record shop in St Albans and listen to loads of albums, even though I couldn’t afford to buy them – traditional British folk music on the Topic label and stuff like that. Then, when I saw Martin Carthy on stage, that was a great breakthrough, I mean Martin had it down! He was already playing the guitar in a very different way, and performing all those British ballads collected by Francis Child. I knew that Joan Baez had recorded some of these Child ballads, but seeing Martin really made me aware of them.”

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For all Donovan’s admiration for Martin Carthy, it was another British singer and guitar player who would make the greatest impression on him.

“Bert Jansch became my teacher in 1965. Bert played British folk tunes too, but slapped and attacked the strings like a blues player – just amazing playing. He’d do these incredible descending runs behind the tune – something he probably learned from Davy Graham, but Bert was my man, I loved what he was doing. Bert was really very good to me – the magnanimity of the artist came out of him. He slowed it all down for me, and that was important. One night in Bert’s kitchen, he showed me the D9 chord, from which I started writing Season Of The Witch, with the descending chord progression from Anji. John Renbourn said I played Season of The Witch in Bert’s kitchen for seven hours straight, so that’s the kind of kitchen Bert had!”

1965 also saw Donovan heading to America, where he per- formed at the Newport Folk Festival and appeared on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest.

“It all happened really fast! Derroll introduced me to Buffy Sainte Marie, as I’d already learned two or three of her songs, and listened to all of her songs. Then Buffy introduced me to Joan Baez, who called up Pete Seeger and said: ‘Donovan’s got to be part of the Newport Folk Festival’ – and that’s what she’d done for Bob Dylan two years earlier, of course. Joan was tremendously helpful to me. So there I was, on the plane to go to to the Newport Folk Festival and also straight to Rainbow Quest with Rev Gary Davis!”

“If you were a guitar picker then, there were two essential songs that you had to learn. One of them was Anji by Davy Graham and the other one was Cocaine Blues by Rev Gary Davis. My early repertoire is drawn very much from folk tradition – Ballad Of Geral- dine is based on an old folk song melody, London Town is a Tim Hardin version of Green, Rocky Road. All that hammering-on and pulling-off on Summer Day Reflection Song comes from listening to the Arabic music that Davy Graham and John Renbourn loved, the oud music. There was a lot of that in London – this is before even the sitar became fashionable.”

Donovan spends about six months of the year in Ireland, and loves to hear the traditional music.

“When I first came here in 1970 I was plugged-in immediately to what was going on. What was different to the British folk scene was that the traditional music in Ireland wasn’t really recorded until Claddagh Records was created by Gareth Browne. He was an aristo- crat with a castle and a coach and four horses that he would ride around in with all the Dublin poets in the late 1950s!”