Jim Donahue, folk singer and friend

Jim Donahue died recently. I remember first hearing him play guitar, a Gandalf like character, with the good magic of Tolkien. It was the deep muffled strum that caught my attention, so powerful and regular that it sounded like eternity’s  freight train . He played a few chords with that magnificent strum and may as well have had a symphony to accompany his deep melodious voice.
Then one night I heard him play a classical guitar piece, one of the classics,   it might have been Handel. It was so  amazing to hear that wondrously intricate heavenly sound watching adept fingers span the whole neck of the guitar. This was years before the ‘unplugged’ era.  It was the time of electric rock and roll ‘lead’ guitar rifts, the most famous being Jimmy Hendrix’s. Yet every once in a while Jim would break off from his  set of Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger type songs and throw in a ‘lead’ that would have pleased the Edge.
He was so inspired.  Mystical and spiritual.  A modern day Hurdy Gurdy man.  He was also a guildsman musician, an old master of his craft, his instrument and voice.  He was a true artist who’d be at home with the Travelling Wilburys, Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. There was a humility about him too. And wisdom. He’d tell stories between songs, Zen, Socratic, Apostolic.
I had helped organize the YWCA “Wise Eye Coffeehouse” at the time.  The going rate for a  singer was $10 a set and the best like Jim , the real draw for a night, might get as much as a $100.  I doubt Neil Young who was playing the same circuit at that time got more.  The coffee houses didn’t serve booze.   Booze was where the owners made their money to pay the talent better. I MC’d the coffeehouse and hired the sets mixing and matching entertainment. Like the night Downchild Blues and Jim played together and the building rocked.
Around the same time I was on Vincent Massey’s High School Student Council with Wes Hazlitt. Carey Asselstine and I were in charge of publicity and entertainment.   We hired the Guess Who that year for our high school dance for $500, a tad before Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman made their millions.
Jim had been in Toronto in the late 60’s. His name was on coffeehouse billboards, in varying orders with Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot.  I asked him once why he’d not made the big record deal contracts.  I knew he’d had the offers.  “The record companies are just business.” He told me.  “It’s all about the money. They didn’t want the musician as much as they wanted his soul. ”  
Jim was a free spirit.  Creative and unfettered. He really would rather be poor as he often was than be contained in some gilded cage or limosine. Not that he wasn’t occasionally caught like the elusive butterfly he was. More than once a truly lovely young lady captured his heart and brought him in from the wild, befriending and mothering him till the inevitable day he left to follow his muse.    He spoke so gently of his mother and his loving creative sister was his very good friend.
I laughed later when his brilliant younger musician brother, Dan Donahue, after making his own perfect record ‘Long Distance Runner” stopped selling his soul to the company store. Instead he began to produce with a sense of what Abbey Road Studio and George Martin did for the Beatles. I loved his contribution to the incredible Bruce Coburn. The Donahues celebrated originality rather than the ‘as like’ factory approach that Joni Mitchell called ‘stoking the fan making machinery behind the popular song.’
Music in that day was about ‘raising consciousness’ ,”finding meaning”, ‘knowing”. The Vietnam War was threatening to become WWIII.  There was an intensity in art.  Visual art had dominated the world in an earlier age with Picasso, Dali and Munch  but this was the era of music with Jim Donahue a regular monk of the day.  So often he’d close a set with the Quaker song, “May the Long Time Sunshine Always Surround you and the Pure Light within you guide your way home.”
We didn’t have contemporary sheet music in the early days and songs were passed along word of mouth or someone would listen to the radio and try to write out the lyrics each time a song was played. Without Jim Donahue I expect it would have been years before Winnipeggers heard the likes of Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire  or Dylan’s “All Along the Watch Tower’.  The kids call it ‘playing covers’ today. But Jim was a wandering minstrel of the day literally introducing us to songs and musicians and ideas that simply weren’t mainstream.  He was so much ahead of his times.
He stayed with me for months one year. It was a particularly tough time in his life and mine.  He’d put aside alcohol after a betrayal and  binge. He was smoking marijuana instead. I’d been injured in a major accident and separated. Late into the night we’d talk philosophy, politics and theology with our visiting genius Jewish friend. I had an East Indian Harmonium.  There was a blizzard raging outside in the Winnipeg winter while Jim like George Harrison filled the space with chants from every tradition.
It was years later we’d meet up again in Vancouver. We’d go for lunch and talk about the ‘times’ mostly.  I loved to hear his tales, He really was a Seanchai, that traditional Gaelic storyteller/historian whose insights are so deeply intuitive.
I will miss him as so many tens of thousands will.  Before Facebook and Instagram and social media he was the “unplugged”  man who had a million hits.