Acoustic Legends

This month Stuart Ryan explores the acoustic guitar style of the influential singer-songwriter who famously taught John Lennon to fingerpick.

Donavan Leitch, who got saddled with the ‘British Bob Dylan’ tag

ABILITY RATING

Info

Key: Various

Tempo: 124 bpm https://bit.ly/3uvNmB6

Will improve your

Fingerpicking technique

Writing with a drone string

Using parallel movement

This month we’re going back to the ‘flower power’ era of the mid-late 1960s with a singer-songwriter guitarist who would have an influence on some of the world’s best loved musicians. Scotsman Donovan Phillips Leitch was born in 1946 and found fame in a decade when using just your first name could carry you all the way into the mainstream. He emerged from the British folk scene taking a solid grounding in acoustic guitar fingerpicking and combining it with the psychedelic and jazz influences that inspired so many musicians of his time. By 1965 he was already finding fame through hit records and appearances on iconic TV shows of the day like Ready Steady Go. International success came the following year with Sunshine Superman and Mellow Yellow, perhaps his best-known song, reaching the top 10 in America. It’s a well-known fact that towards the end of the 1960s he befriended John Lennon and taught him the fingerpicking patterns that Lennon would employ in Beatles classics Dear Prudence and Julia among others. Famously he was also compared to Bob Dylan in a 1960s-style Blur vs Oasis rivalry that was ramped up by the UK media. Dylan was certainly an influence on Donovan but in truth both were strongly shaped by US folk legend Woody Guthrie and English folk pioneer Martin Carthy. Both Donovan and Dylan’s writing and fingerpicking styles share the hallmarks of these two greats so it’s easy to see why Donovan was frustrated with the comparisons at the time.