Donovan (Leitch), the amazing Celtic folkie who scored many pop hits in the mid to late 1960s:
Season of the Witch
To Sing for You
Catch the Wind
Colours
Universal Soldier
Sunny Goodge Street
Sunshine Superman
Mellow Yellow
There Is a Mountain
Wear Your Love Like Heaven
Hurdy Gurdy Man
Epistle to Dippy
Jennifer Juniper
Lalena
Atlantis
To Susan on the West Coast Waiting
Barabajagal
Happiness Runs
Riki Tiki Tavi
Cosmic Wheels.
A popular singer-songwriter praised by the likes of George Harrison, David Lynch, Franco Zefferelli, John Mellancamp, Joan Baez, Eric Burdon, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page, Graham Nash, Stephen King, John Lennon, The Beach Boys, Brian Jones, Rick Rubin, David Lynch, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. A fine romantic songwriter who also influenced the likes of Bruce Cockburn and Suzanne Vega.
A good place to start exploring Donovan are his early folk LPs before 1965. His Greatest Hits CD remastered contains his core work and reveals his basic sensibility.
A more comprehensive overview is to be found in the out-of-print To Try for the Sun: The Journey of Donovan sensuous purple boxset (3 CDs, 1 rare DVD of his drop-out Greece odyssey with Gypsy Dave from ’69). This set includes 1 CD of his later material; his later work, incidentally, has remained of a high calibre right up to today.
The wonderful, interesting 2 DVD deluxe edition of Sunshine Superman: The Journey of Donovan (film: 3 hrs. + bonus footage) gives you his complete life-story and musical career from childhood, through the early folk vagabond years to the mid and late 1960s pop hits to his many changes and periods that followed right up to 2008. You can also find many post 2008 interviews and live performances online, plus the Live in LA DVD done in conjunction with David Lynch.
There is also a print version of his life in The Hurdy Gurdy Man: The Autobiography of Donovan, which contains many stories not found in the Sunshine Superman DVD.
For LP collectors, there are also the coloured vinyl versions of several of his albums, including a bright yellow disc of Mellow Yellow.
and a green disc of the Hurdy Gurdy Man lp
Not to be missed: Donovan’s early 1965 work–2 album’s worth with his first hits and most of the songs written by him. Highly recommended as another, alternate starting point for an exploration of this remarkable folk singer, guitarist and composer.
Donovan was influenced from a young age by the English Romantic poets; later by Jack Kerouac and the Beats, and still later by TM and Celtic stories and ballads. He is very much a poet of positive consciousness, very growth-oriented, with what he calls a somewhat ‘feminine’ sensibility about Nature, the beautiful, and fashions.
Linda, his longtime girlfriend and wife, is highlighted and she narrates some of the later footage, too. And his late father gives a good reading of Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”.
In 1986, I was lucky enough to see him live at the Edmonton Folk Festival in the glory days when it brought in big names like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Elvis Costello.
Something different: a rare 2017 signed chapbook of his poems (1 0f 20 signed copies) I picked up along the way:
One of his best post-1970 album releases was produced by Rick Ruben for American Recordings in 1995 (every track a Zen winner):
The other outstanding post-2000 project was the retroish Beat Cafe, which featured a hip performance of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night”:
