Yes, speaking of Donovan, he does have some absolutely amazing stuff that never “made it big”. Do you know Jersey Thursday or the almost jazzy-sounding Sunny Goodge Street? Probably my two favourite Donovan tracks, and certainly in the top five. The links take you to them on YouTube - if you’ve never heard them, please take a listen.
Thinking of Donovan reminded me of Season of the Witch and that made me think of Julie Driscoll. Here she is doing Road to Cairo. Wow! Now there’s an underappreciated bit of 60s music.
Chefguy: When talking about some of Donovan’s less “famous” stuff, it would be wrong of me to leave out The Fat Angel.. Another absolutely super track from of the people/groups that formed a huge chunk of what I listened to way back . . .
I also love Forever Changes and, well, some of their other stuff.
If John Echols the lead guitarist on Forever Changes and on their earlier stuff (and Arthur Lee’s collaborator even before Love was formed) has died, Wikipedia has not heard about it. Indeed, Wikipedia seems to think he is still performingwith a band still calling itself Love. Certainly he outlived Lee. Lee, of course, was by far the most important original member. Love also has the distinction of being perhaps the first significant American racially mixed rock band. Lee and Echols were black, the other main members were white (arguably also at least one Hispanic at one time).
If you’re going to bring up the Spencer Davis Group, you also need to go with Traffic. Mr. Fantasy, Traffic and Last Exit are they’re 60s albums, all of which are classics.
For single songs, there’s Jaime Brockett’s absolutely insane “Legend of the USS Titanic” (based on a Ledbelly song).
English folk singer Anne Briggs is mostly forgotten today, but a listen to these gorgeous songs will show why she was such an influence on singers who came after her, like June Tabor, Sandy Denny, Christy Moore and Maddy Prior. She released her main albums in the 1970’s but her first EP was released in 1964, as well as several other tracks which appeared on Anne Briggs: A Collection.
Here are a few links. If nothing else, everyone should hear this first song.
“Lowlands” (1964)
Ok, this is from her 1971 album Anne Briggs, but it’s such an iconic song that she performed live throughout the 1960’s, and besides, she taught it to frequent musical partner Bert Jansch, founding member of Pentangle, who recorded it in 1966.
This really isn’t a serious suggestion, because they may be quite rightly underappreciated, vocally at least, since that can be an acquired taste. I nominate the fun group Holy Modal Rounders in the realm of “Music that makes me smile.” It helps if I have very good drugs handy, which I did back when I discovered them.
Like many people, I first heard the Holy Modal Rounders via the film Easy Rider, with their novelty “Bird Song,” (1969) but a friend had their albums and I discovered they had other fun songs too, most with silly lyrics. We did a LOT of drugs back then, but I still can’t help but grin while listening to “Boobs a Lot” and was thrilled to discover it on YouTube.
HMR trivia: The actor/playwright Sam Shepard was a member of the HMRs for a while. To hear how multi-talented this guy is, listen to his crazy-ass drumming on the demented instrumental song “Indian War Whoop” (1967). I believe he played drums on that whole album.
I was a big fan of another folkie group, The Clancey Brothers and Tommy Makem. They had a large catalog of traditional Irish songs, as well as newer tunes, and they were entertaining as hell. One of the newer songs was Lament For Brendan Behan.
The Holy Modal Rounders’ first two albums, with only Peter Stampfel & Steve Weber, were old-timey music true to the spirit of the originals–with some “modern” lyrics, like the first recorded “psychodelic.” I loved this stuff. Their career became successively weirder–and they supplied the musical talent for the first Fugs’ records.
The Youngbloods have been mentioned. Their Elephant Mountain is one of those albums that really holds together–mellow & haunting in turn.
Of course Love’s Forever Changes is a masterpiece.
One of Houston’s folky legends thought I was playing Gilded Palace of Sin too much; he said, if I had to listen to that kind of thing, I ought to get Wheatstraw Suite by the Dillards. One Dillard brother who left the band later joined Gene Clark, an original Byrd, for two albums as the Dillard & Clark Expedition. (Gram Parsons was great but he did not invent country rock all by himself.) Hey, Buffalo Springfield was mixing genres up even a bit earlier–only two albums before they fell apart…
The Sir Douglas Quintet’s 1969 Mendocino included the title tune, a smallish hit for them, and “At The Crossroads”–heard quite a bit on FM radio as recorded by Mott the Hoople…
Another favorite with regional roots was The Unwritten Works of Geoffrey, Etc. by the somewhat obscure Whistler, Chaucer, Detroit & Greenhill.
Outside the Beatles universe you had the Beach Boys and Four Seasons in the US. Then there was the Zombies and Rolling Stones. Nat King Cole, Petula Clark, and the Supremes all figured prominently in the 60s.
Then of course, you had Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bernstein, and Bart.
Tom Paxton. If you need proof, just look at the list of covers in the article. A lot of people don’t even know his name, but you know his songs. “Rambling Boy” is often credited as a “traditional American folk song,” which Paxton has said “is the highest tribute paid to a folk song.”