Karen, Without checking the official sources, I'm going to say that Donovan Leitch wrote the song, and that Dylan has enough of his own songs and doesn't have to mooch any off of Donovan. Donovan did at least two versions of his own song: One strictly acoustic and owing a lot to Dylan's style. It might have been Donovan before he discovered his own voice, but it is now the preferred version on greatest hits collections. And the version that I first heard from his Greatest Hits (1969), was a version with a much more echoing vibrato of Donovan's voice and the addition of Jimmy Page, JP Jones and the LZ drummer, adding a much more heavy rock sound a la the Hurdy Gurdy Man. This is still my preferred version which is not easy to find now. It is much more dramatic and dynamic version descending from this ethereal longing of his love poem to the crashing and rousing crescendo that underscores his more visceral and earthy plea, "For standing in your heart is where I want to be - and I long to be - Ah but I may as well try and catch the wind." Sounds like he's going to have a better chance of catching her from this more earthly vantage point than in his poetic musings.
The folky version lacks much of a dynamic, but has the integrity of being pure monotonic (ha!) in comparisons. Joe C. On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Karen Allen <kallena...@msn.com> wrote: > Yesterday I was playing with a new flash drive that connects you to radio > stations from all over the world. I came across an oldies station that at > one point played a beautiful version of "Catch the Wind" that I had never > heard before and was different from the one recorded by Donovan. I tried to > learn who the performer was so I could buy a copy of it, but had no luck. > (I later learned that I could have gone directly to the station website and > viewed the playlist, but by the time I knew that they had dropped the song > from the playlist.) > > When I googled the song title, there were some sources who said that Bob > Dylan wrote it, and others who said that Donavan wrote it. The > snippets that I was able to listen to on Amazon, etc, was not the version I > heard. > > So here are my questions: Was it Bob Dylan or Donovan who wrote "Catch the > Wind"? Is anyone familiar with an oldies version of "Catch the Wind" by any > male male artist other than Donovan? > > Thanks for any leads... > > _______________________________________________ > ucneighbors mailing list > ucneighb...@lists.asc.upenn.edu > http://lists.asc.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/ucneighbors > >
