The singer-songwriter Donovan, who just finished a major U.S. tour to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking album, “Sunshine Superman,” is on the phone to talk about his role in the creation of the explosive cultural movement of the 1960s.

Blending jazz, blues, world music, and West Coast U.S. rock, the Scotsman wrote and recorded some of the decade’s most memorable songs (“Mellow Yellow”), and scored a dozen Top 40 hits in the U.S. alone.

“My father brought me up as a social animal, reading me poetry of noble thought.”

Along the way, he made other quiet contributions. He taught Beatle John Lennon the finger-picking guitar style, for example. (He also helped popularize Transcendental Meditation — but that’s another story.)

It was “Sunshine Superman,” however, that made him a major pop star. His single of the same name reached the top of the Billboard charts in September 1966.

Today, Donovan (who rarely uses his last name, Leitch) and Linda, his wife of 46 years, split their time between Ireland, Spain, and New York.

Question: On your recent tour, you sold out some awfully important venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York. Obviously, people still want to hear you, and appreciate the 50th anniversary of “Sunshine Superman.” What does the anniversary mean to you?
Answer: It just sort of crept up, after the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2012, and the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 2014. Linda said, “It’s your 50th now. What do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, I’d like to go and thank the fans.”

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So we did this tour. At the same time, it’s a body of work, and re-presenting a body of work is important, I think, for a poet. And to actually present it live was very important to me. I chose to do it cross-legged on sheepskins on a riser and tell stories, and play the songs the way they were written, just me alone, on a guitar. That’s how all my songs came [to me].

Q: When you were traveling around the U.K. with your friend, Gypsy Dave, as a teenager in the early ’60s, did you ever dream of such things?
A: You know, I didn’t really start to do this with Gypsy Dave to become a pop star or make it a steady job. It was a mission. My father brought me up as a social animal, reading me poetry of noble thought. He said, “Just do some good with the work.” The role of poet, of course, is to present to people the inner deeper consciousness, as poets have always done. And the Scots and the Welsh go all the way back in the tradition of poetry and music — and in playwrights in modern times, as well. I come from that background. So I felt I could go out and travel around the world and present the songs. The difficulty now is to sing all the songs that everybody wants to hear. [Laughs]

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Q: After your first two folk albums, you were a great proponent of the idea of “flower power,” which in Eastern philosophy is the unfolding of consciousness within.
A: It’s part of evolution. I think the phrase stuck to me because I presented a floral aspect. At the Hollywood Bowl concert [in September 1967], I ordered every blue iris within 100 miles to make a mandala [an Indian religious symbol]. I wanted to sing in the center of it.

Q: John Mellencamp, with whom you toured a bit in 2005, inducted you into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. What did that signify to you?
A: Well, it’s a great honor. In a way, it made me think of what all this fame and appreciation means. And it became clear to me that my work has been influential, and it continues to support young artists to experiment and break the rules … He said he was inspired by the melodies and the lyrical content, and the arrangements on my records. He also told me that when he was a young kid, he’d go to the beach with all the young men and women, and sing a Donovan song, and somehow the girls would flock around. He said, “This is something to be involved with.”

Q: Other than “Sunny Goodge Street,” which was pre-1966, “Sunshine Superman” was such a departure from the folk and blues that you had been doing. Did you worry you would lose that core folk base?
A: It was natural for me, but I was listening to jazz. My father played Billie Holiday and Gene Krupa, the big band generation in the ’40s. And my mother played Frank Sinatra. She called him “my Frankie.” So I heard all those great guys playing with Frankie. And my parents had a few classical albums lying around, and I heard those. But the actual fusion on “Sunny Goodge Street” was very much an experiment of mine. I wasn’t the first to put jazz and classics together, but I probably was the first to put it into context with what was about to be unleashed on popular culture — the revolutionary sound in music, and art and literature.

Q: You’ve had “secret” fans, people who loved your music but wouldn’t admit it. Why is that?
A: Some of my fans used to say they had to hide my albums under their bed. Their friends would ridicule them. [Laughs] So they put the Beatles on to swing and dance. They put the Rolling Stones on to get sexy and raunchy. But after they stopped listening to the Beatles and the Stones, they put a Donovan song on late in the evening. This little boy called Donovan kept singing his quiet little songs, but actually leaping up the charts with Top 40 hits.

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Q: You contracted polio as a child. It was a gift in a way, wasn’t it?
A: A lot of highly skilled, influential, historical poets have often had some kind of disability. Artists, in the ancient days, were often blind. Robert Louis Stevenson was a sick child, and produced an enormous amount of work for the dreaming child. I think when you have a disability early, it encourages another talent in you. And so, I don’t think it was a bad thing.

Q: You’re now 70 years old, but still very active.
A: Yes, I’m on my way to the next decade. I’m healthy and Linda helps me to do that. And I’ve got my hair. [Laughs] And so I’m still working — but in a different way. I’m moving into a completely new stage. It’s a new horizon. It’s not retirement. I’ve drawn a line on one part of my life and here comes the next.