Jack Donovan

Rock music's first two-LP box set, A Gift from a Flower to a Garden overcomes its original shortcomings and stands out as a prime artifact of the flower-power era that produced it. The music still seems a bit fey, and overall more spacy than the average Moody Blues album of this era, but the sheer range of subjects and influences make this a surprisingly rewarding work. Essentially two albums recorded simultaneously in the summer of 1967, the electric tracks include Jack Bruce among the session players. The acoustic tracks represent an attempt by Donovan to get back to his old sound and depart from the heavily electric singles ("Sunshine Superman," etc.) and albums he'd been doing - it is folkier and bluesier (in an English folk sense) than much of his recent work.

Donovan's last truly great album of the 1960s, 1968's BARABAJAGAL shows interesting artistic growth at least as marked as his transformation from folk troubadour to daffy hippie-pop guru. The title track and "Trudi" feature the Rod Stewart-era Jeff Beck Group as Donovan's backing band; consequently both these songs have a surprising amount of sonic heft to them…

Essential: a masterpiece of country-folk music.
Donovan's second album found the Scottish folkie in possession of his own voice, a style of earnest, occasionally mystical musings indebted neither to Woody Guthrie nor Bob Dylan.

As a finishing touch for this 2016 year, I share this rarity.
This is the version of Fairytale that collectors from all over the world are looking for: The Brazilian edition 7″ with yellow cover.