Donovan: Donna Donna

This is Donovan in the days when he was a teenager and seen as Britain's answer to Bob Dylan. Donna Donna appeared on his first LP, What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid and had already been made popular through a recording by Joan Baez.

I know it from the days when I had a rule that if I went into a charity shop I had to buy a record. The 1971 compilation Golden Hour of Donovan was one of my better purchases.

Donna Donna sounds like a folk song, but dates only from 1940 when it was written for a Yiddish theatre production in New York. It is hard not to see its real subject matter as the Holocaust.