In the 1960s, Judy Collins was a muse for the entire Greenwich Village folk scene—she was one of the first to record songs by Dylan, one of the first to record songs Joni Mitchell, and one of the first to record songs by Leonard Cohen. She was this beautiful Colorado snowbird, with a voice as fresh and as clear as a Rocky Mountain forest, and her image and her delivery helped America cross over into listening to a completely different style of pop music. And her life was as epic as the times she was living in: she was famously a romantic muse to Stephen Stills, who wrote “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for her, which he performed for the first time at Woodstock, opening his set with his new trio, Crosby, Stills and Nash. The song seemed to be just as much an elegy for his romantic relationship with Collins as it was for the dizzying tumult of the ’60s itself. And this tumult has been well documented by Collins, who at 84 has recorded more than 40 albums, and written eight books. She’s survived divorce, alcoholism, an eating disorder, and the untimely death of her only son. And she’s still pouring her heart out on stage, 100 times a year. She performs at the Parkway Theater on Thursday night.
I read your memoir, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music, and I was so fascinated by the emerging folk music scene that you were part of in the early 1960s. It was so grassroots, with entertainers approaching bar and cafe owners all over the country, anywhere from Denver to New York, and pitching them: “Hey, would you want to try out a folk singer?” And at the same time, you had your friend Jac Holzman at Elektra, who founded a record label in order to capitalize on this grassroots movement.
It’s interesting because in the late ’50s, you still had to have a band and get a lot of money together and do all the songs of Rodgers and Hart. And all of a sudden there are these kids—like when I came to Elektra, Cynthia Gooding was playing, Jean Richie was on Elektra, Josh White was on Elektra. Anyway, it began to pick up so that now a guy with a guitar could walk out on the stage and make a living and sing the songs that sometimes he wrote, or usually that Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie wrote.
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie started their careers writing songs to raise money for the unions—that’s how they got their start. But our songs were coming out of a social revolt over what was going on in the country—everybody was lying to us. And I think there was a deep interest in the songs from the past. The first six albums I made were all traditional, or they were songs of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, etc. So it grew and grew. I didn’t write songs myself until after I met Leonard Cohen, and he said, “Why aren’t you writing your own songs?”
At one point in the book, you write about how you believe songs came to you in your mother’s womb. Your dad was in the radio business, of course, so he was in this world of commercial music, but he also had such a rich base of these Irish rebel songs, songs that preceded Seeger and Woody Guthrie.
Yes, indeed. He was doing those in 1937. And he was an integrated man, intellectually, physically, emotionally. I think he had a lot of problems to deal with, being blind in a world that was sighted, but he learned how to get around and he learned what to do. And he was the most well-read person I think I’ve ever known. As kids, we read out loud to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and we got what we called talking books from the Library of Congress. So we’d hear plays like The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot or things read by Judith Anderson and John Gielgud. I mean, it was such a rich background that I grew up in.
He was reading Ralph Waldo Emerson on air.
That’s right. And Dylan Thomas. My mother always said, “You didn’t come by this yourself—this thing of being able to pick the song that’s going to work for you—daddy did the same thing.” He always chose the very, very best of the Great American Songbook.
So you were raised in this bourgeois, middle-class environment, and you were exposed to all this cultural content, but at the same time, you didn’t exactly come from wealth. And when you decided to leave the house to pursue your dreams right after high school, you got pregnant soon after.
Yeah. That’s true.
So how did you originally get the idea in your head that you could do this, that you could be a folk singer out in the nightclubs of the West?
When I fell in love with folk music at 16. I jumped out of the concert pianist role, right into playing the guitar—learning the guitar, learning all the songs, joining the Denver Folklore Society. But my career had really started when I was a little girl. The first public performance of mine was a concert in Butte, Montana where my father said, why don’t you get up and sing something? I was always performing. I was performing on my father’s radio show, was performing on the school shows. I had this little group called the Little Reds because we did this skit based on “Little Red Riding Hood” and played it all over town. We played it at the Kiwanis Club and the Elks Club and the Lowry Air Force Base and the Children’s Hospital. We just did it, the three of us, myself and my two girlfriends who were dancers, and I made up the songs.
And so I was always performing, so it wasn’t anything new to me. The first thing that happened after I picked up the guitar and started singing was that a friend of my father’s called him up and said, “My daughter is in a contest called Stars of Tomorrow,” it was a Kiwanis Club contest. They still have them, by the way. My nephews go and perform and win them quite often. Anyway, my father said, Dr. So-and-so has entered you into this contest. I bought a new dress, I packed my guitar up and got on a plane and flew to Atlantic City where I performed. The act preceding me was the Marine Marching Band, and the act following me was the air cadets from Colorado Springs. They had been in Denver at Lowry Air Force Base for a while, and a bunch of my girlfriends and I would date these guys. So I won my first big contest, the Stars of Tomorrow. I was 17, and they gave me a check for $500. So at 17, I started making money.
And then I sang and I sang, and I learned songs, and I sang some more. And then my husband said to me one day, “We don’t have any money.” I said, “Yeah, you’re right, we don’t.” He said, “Why don’t you get a job doing something you know how to do?” And I called my dad and he got me an audition at Michael’s Pub in Boulder, and that’s how it started. And it paid $100 a week, which was a fortune.
And then you started singing in Chicago pretty soon after that?
Oh, I started rolling immediately. I started in Boulder at Michael’s Pub, and then I went on and began to travel all over the country, all over Colorado, and then all over the country, and then all over the world, so it’s working out pretty well.
Didn’t Dylan see you before you saw him?
Yeah, he did. He said, “I used to sit at your feet.” He came to the Gilded Garter in Central City, Colorado. He was homeless, it was 1959. He was always trying to get a job at the various hootenannies around town. And he thought if he came and sat at my feet, that somebody would pick him up and ask him to sing, which sometimes happened. And then I was at a big festival near New Haven in 1961, and there was Dick Fariña when he was married to Carolyn Hester, and Dylan was out there singing, and he was still singing old Woody Guthrie blues, I thought badly performed, badly chosen. I mean, I thought he was a big bore, even if he was awfully cute.
Great hair.
Sweet guy. Would talk to me, laugh with me, have a drink with me. And then I picked up a copy of Sing Out and I read the lyrics to this song called “Blowing in the Wind,” and as I began to read it, I thought, Oh, my God, this is an incredible song. And then at the end, it was Bob Dylan’s name and I thought, There has to be some mistake here. He had changed his name just recently. Anyway, I tried to write him a letter, but of course, it didn’t ever get to him because he was homeless. I think I must have sent it to Sing Out to try to get to him. But anyway, yeah, he was on the rise, I was on the rise, we were all on the rise. I recorded him in ’61 and ’62, “Masters of War” and “Farewell,” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”
I was thinking about the simplicity of your instrument. I read a New York Times Magazine story about Taylor Swift recently, about how her voice is geared towards singing her own story songs—”a voice so pure and pretty that it makes you wonder why so many of her musical peers and predecessors work so hard.” The writer writes, “It’s not an otherworldly voice, but a specifically worldly one.” Your voice helped people understand these songs that were being written by artists like Dylan and Leonard Cohen, even Joni Mitchell—artists with more idiosyncratic voices. Your voice helped people connect with these great songs.
Well, I learned that from my father—you could hear every word, he was clear as a bell. He was a fine singer, and he knew what he was doing. These songs are written in English language, and if one can understand them, it goes a long way. And I was very fortunate to find a teacher in 1965 with whom I studied for 32 years. Max Margulis. Max really taught me the bel canto style, and that’s why I can still work like a dog and sing like a lark.
At 84 years old, how often are you singing per week?
Before the pandemic, I was doing 125 shows a year. I think it’s down to a hundred this year, but it’ll probably go back up. I just finished a tour in England where I was out for three and a half weeks and I sang in many cities in England, and then we went over to Utrecht, and it’s seamless. It’s a gift from the heavens, but it’s also a gift from my training. Bel canto prevents the wobble. We don’t want to go hear a singer who goes like this [affects a weird melisma]. I went to a performance last night in New York, and I won’t mention who it was, what it was, but one of the singers went [affects weird melisma again] the whole time. I mean, who wants to hear that? And who can understand it? So I just was lucky. And bel canto is the secret of singers through the centuries.
So you were able to provide this kind of, I think Life Magazine called it…
“The gentle voice among the strife.”
Yes. Your life was so crazy and the United States at the time was so crazy with the Vietnam War. I mean, you testified at the Chicago Seven trial, where they gagged you on the stand when you tried to sing, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Aaron Sorkin didn’t have the nerve or the intelligence to put that in the movie.
It must’ve been exciting to be in the middle of such a convulsive art scene back then though—having affairs with guys like Minneapolis’s own Spider John Koerner.
Oh, God, I adored him. Is he still around? I don’t know if I’ve seen him in a while, but he was such an angelic guy.
So there were perks—beautiful artists everywhere—but the life of a singer constantly on the road seemed difficult.
Well, it was hard. It’s a hard life, and especially if you’re drinking, I mean, it’s insane, if you’re drunk, which I was, but I was very, very controlled and lucky to know how to do that. I learned that from my dad. So I was lucky until it all fell apart in 1978.
That’s the year you got sober. So the songs that your generation was producing, the songs that you were interpreting for your peers, whether it’s Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell, do you think that these songs actually changed the world for the better?
They kept me alive. And I remember a guy coming up to me, and this has happened more than once and he said, “you got me through Vietnam.” That’s a wonderful thing to hear. I don’t know what it did for the country—I think it was always healing, I think it still is. People need live music, they need good art, they need to go to paintings and look at paintings, they need to have poetry. We really need every bit of art that we can get just to keep us on the planet. So maybe I kept some people on the planet that might have gone out somewhere else.
But I do think that there was a shift as the 60s progressed—the songs you sang went from protest songs to songs that were more about an interior experience, where you were trying to understand what was going on internally. And maybe that’s how music can effect change, or maybe it’s just how songs document the changes.
I don’t know if this happens with a rock and roll band where everybody’s standing up and screaming, but for me, I get the privilege of being in a situation where people are listening, and they can’t get on their phones, and it allows them the privilege of silence in their own heads. And not only to listen to the music, but to be dreaming and thinking, and quite frankly, sometimes changing their minds about something. It is a privilege to be in that position. And however long it goes on, it’s always important to have that in your own life and to see it in others.
Are there any songs, either story songs or protest songs, written in the last decade that have entered your life in the same way that some of those early Dylan songs entered your life?
Well, I’d have to say yes to that. I can tell you that one of my most recent discoveries, and this is why I say they often just come floating through the ether to me: Don McLean has just written a song called “The Ballad of George Floyd.” And I heard it, and I flipped out, and I said, “Oh my God, I have to sing this song, and it’ll be on my next album.” My most recent songs that have a social, political implication, there’s a song on my new album, Spellbound, called “Thomas Merton.” And it’s about Thomas Merton’s life, of course, but it’s about his death as well, and about the fact that he was actually murdered by the CIA.
It seems like the political turmoil hasn’t stopped since the ’60s—or maybe it’s just ramping up to that kind of intensity again. So what gives you hope now that you’re in your ninth decade of life?
Hope is always here: the poets know it, the painters know it, the singers know it. It is present all the time, no matter what’s happening. We’re not unusual, it’s not about us, it’s about the way the planet is structured. If you look at history, you know that it’s always been happening, forever. People like to kill each other, and then they like to mourn about it, and they like to try to do something to change it. But the truth is, it’s never going to change, I’m sorry to tell you that. You’re too young to have to know that, but if you’ve read Paradise Lost, and we all should, as I finally did, you realize that the devil, the fallen angel is very real, he’s alive and kicking. And his idea about what should be going on here will always be opposed to what mine is or yours is, but that’s his job. It’s our job to get through it and to mourn and to figure out how to stop it if it’s possible. So it’s a lot of work.
Your book closes with a lesson from Judaism about the three stages of grief: first there’s weeping—you must weep for what you’ve lost. Second comes silence—and from the silence, we understand solace, beauty, and comfort. And third comes the singing—for in singing, we pour out our hearts and regain our voice.
That’s the truth, you have to do those things. Somebody asked me about what my preparation for getting on the stage, and I said: “It’s daily life.” It’s how much did you sleep last night? Did you have your lunch? Have you made a date with somebody you like to have dinner? Did you go to a play? Did you see something wonderful? Did you read a poem? Did you write a poem? So you have to keep what your life is doing foremost in your essence, and then, that’s right, the finale is singing.