I agree with the posters who say Wizz Jones should be getting recognition he deserves.

But could I suggest that the Folk Awards are not about or for the folk scene particularly? They are much broader than that. People may piss and moan about Donovan getting an award (and I would question the value of giving an award to someone who hasn't really produced any decent new music in over 30 years), but I can assure you that the budget "Universal Soldier" album was the only remotely folkish album in my Mum and Dad's record collection - sat alongside Hert Alpert's Tijuana Brass, Strings For Pleasure Play the Hits of Bacharach & David and so on. This means it was the first folk album I ever heard and it's chock full of wonderful songs, largely played on acoustic guitar, with a debt to Dylan, a debt to pop music, but most definitely at least a couple of toes wiggling in the direction of tradition.

I can also confirm that when he headlined the Saturday night at Moseley Folk Festival last year, a large proportion of the crowd, many of whom probably wren't even born when he was pop star, were loving it. Same as when he played The Green Man Festival a few years back - he still knows how to connect with a crowd that identifies itself as interested in folk music but is not necessarily made up of people bound by the conventions of the folk revival.

Personally, I'm not a huge Donovan fan, but I think that "A Gift From A Flower To A Garden" is a lovely album and "Season of the Witch", one of his (gasp) pop songs, is a stone classic. I say give him the award, give him his moment. This is surely about celebrating people who acheived some sort of mainstream success but came from or had one foot in the broader folk camp. He deserves it at least as much as Richard Thompson did.

(File under: Folk definitions #3: Folk as marketing concept)