Worshipped by folk fans but a devil to herself, she’s survived the best and worst of life, forging on as a regal ambassador for songs and their writers. “I don’t need fireworks,” says Judy Collins. “I just need to tell a story.”
As Judy Collins thumbs the yellowed pages of sing out! magazine, the blue eyes hymned by Crosby, stills & nash light up. it’s an edition from the very end of 1960, with lightnin’ hopkins on the cover; moJo brought it along today in case it brought back memories of what she calls the Great Folk scare. “i’m sure it was in sing out! that i saw the words to blowin’ in the wind,” she reflects. “i thought, That guy wrote this?”
A professional folk singer since the late-’50s, having turned her back on classical piano, Collins first met bob dylan at the Gilded Garter in Central City, Colorado. she wasn’t impressed: “badly chosen woody Guthrie songs, badly sung.” by mid-’62, relocated to new york, she was married with a child and two albums into a record deal with Jac holzman’s elektra label; dylan was pumping out songs of genius. “i sat with Jac watching dylan at City hall. he said, ‘you should record that one’… ‘And that one’… ‘And that one…’”
but Collins didn’t need holzman’s help to spot a song. Joni mitchell, leonard Cohen, Jimmy webb, stephen sondheim: their compositions all enjoyed showcases on key Collins albums in the ’60s and ’70s, as she moved away from pure folk to embrace the wider world of lyric-led song. her picture on the sleeves of those records suggested a wise head, but her biography, told frankly in three memoirs since 1987, is a different story: of wild affairs, depression, alcoholism and tragedy (her son, Clark, committed suicide in 1992). even her voice, its clear, monumental tone a seeming constant, left her for a while.
yet in 2019, the latest generation of folk-inspired artists queue for her blessing. At the newport Folk Festival in late July, brandi Carlile joined Collins on a version of Joni’s both sides now – a hit for Judy in 1968 – and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold duetted on turn! turn! turn!, the Pete seeger song from Collins’ third album that gave a certain Jim mcGuinn, who played on it shortly before forming the byrds, food for thought. she has an album due in november – Winter Stories – and shows scheduled through autumn and into 2020. we’re only sat here, in a sunny suite at mayfair’s Grosvenor house hotel, because Collins is working; she’s on her way home from a headline slot at the wickham festival in hampshire.
At 80, she’s a mix of distinguished and mischievous, her regal white mane offset by an earthy laugh, a swallow tattoo at the base of her thumb and a gold necklace with the word Resist. she’ll break into song at the drop of a hat and dive into politics as quickly (“i used to stay at the dorchester before it was bought by the sultan of brunei. that guy stones women, homosexuals, anything that moves!”). she says she inherited both tendencies from her father – so it’s with him that we begin.
Your father was a singer and a radio broadcaster in Seattle, then Denver. What kind of radio are we talking about?
Now we call it Golden Age radio – talk and
music. He was a great singer and played piano beautifully, told jokes and read Emerson poetry, Dylan Thomas. He talked about politics – he was outrageously outspoken, an activist. He was blind from the age of four but awfully bright and incredibly well read. The books took up so much room – Moby-Dick was like 40 huge volumes of Braille. He’d always say, “It’s not so bad being blind – you can read in the dark!” He sang a lot of Rodgers & Hart and he sang a lot of English, Irish and Scottish folk songs. I grew up listening to Danny Boy.
So music was in the family, but do you remember a moment when it touched you especially?
Well, when I was three my father took me on a National School Assemblies tour, which was a WPA initiative, a New Deal thing. We were in Butte, Montana, in a high school auditorium jammed with kids, and he said, “Do you wanna sing for the nice people?” And I said, “Sure.” And I sang I’ll Be Home For Christmas. It was July, by the way! But I think that’s what hooked me. When you receive that kind of response to what you’re doing, it turns something on in you. It certainly did with me.
Did you think you would be a concert pianist?
Oh, I was very serious. And my teacher was very serious for me. [Antonia] Brico was a great pioneer. She conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1929 – she was 27 years old. She was unstoppable. People would tell her, “You can’t do that,” and she said, “Yes I can.”
But you gave up the piano for folk music?
I was 15 and a half, it must have been the summer of 1955, and all set to do the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto Number 2 the following spring with Brico’s orchestra, but I turned on the radio and heard this song – it was a version of The Gypsy Rover [an adaptation by Elton Hayes] that was from an Alan Ladd movie called The Black Knight – and I just flipped out. The next week the guy on this show plays Barbara Allen by Jo Stafford. It changed my life. No more Rachmaninov.
How tough was this to break to Brico?
Oh, horrible… Horrible. My father got it, I think. I said I needed a guitar, and he rented one for me. It came with seven jazz lessons; I took one. He was an optimist – I think he presumed I’d give it up. But Brico… we would always have dramatic sessions anyway because I was never practising enough for her. Anyway, I went to her and we both wept and I said I have to do this. I don’t think she ever really forgave me.
By the time you hit Greenwich Village, you’d been married three years, with a son, and you’d really paid your dues as a folk singer.
Denver, Chicago, Oklahoma, Ottawa, Central City. I worked all the time. I played Washington DC, at the Shadows. That’s when I first ran into John Phillips, when he had the group The Journeymen. I got to New York in April 1961, headlining at Gerde’s Folk City after doing this for just two years. Everyone seemed to be there. Dave Van Ronk was there. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was there. Mr Robert Zimmerman hanging out at the bar. I was pretty dazzled by the turnout. Then I realised that my opener was a 13-year-old called Arlo Guthrie!
Jac Holzman signed you to Elektra soon after, around the same time as Judy Henske, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Fred Neil. You’re all quite different from the previous decade’s Elektra artists like Theodore Bikel and Jean Ritchie… Did you feel like the next generation?
It was interesting. Jac had seen me at the Exodus in Denver in ’59 – which is something he only told me a few years ago. I had opened for Bob Gibson – it had been Bob who’d called [Newport Folk Festival founder] George Wein about Baez. And it was the same kind of thing. I opened for Bob and he called Jac and said, “I’ve found your Joan Baez.” So Jac came to see me, but didn’t introduce himself – he said he’d had to wait and make sure I was serious. So in ’61, I come off stage from this TV show in New York with The Clancy Brothers and Theo Bikel and there’s Jac saying, “You’re ready to make a record.”
That album, A Maid Of Constant Sorrow, is largely traditional, but the next few, from 1962’s Golden Apples Of The Sun through to ’67’s Wildflowers, are an evolution. It’s like you’re massaging your folk audience to accept a broader palette.
Yes! Haha! Massaging. You’re right. I was very lucky because Mark Abramson, who produced those albums, and Jac, were adventurous. They’d grown up with lots of different music, as I had. It wasn’t about staying in one lane; it was about, What’s musical? Mark had been involved with Elektra for years. He was the guy who went out and recorded all the sound effects records that they’d made from 1953, ’54 and which really sustained the company. Mark and Jac and I were a trio.
This was when you brought Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen to the public eye. Have you reflected on how much you had in common with Joni? Both of you had polio when you were young. Both of you had married young, had a child, got divorced…
Well, I was just crazy about her songs. From the minute she played Both Sides Now down the phone to me, the night Al Kooper called me and put her on the line – thank you Al Kooper! I ran right over with Jac the next day. She had a little apartment in New York, with lots of crystal and candles – it was always very romantic. She would sing these songs and I would weep. She and I wouldn’t really talk about our lives, just about her songs.
At the time I was on the board of Newport with George Wein and Jac, Theo Bikel and Peter Yarrow, and it was in this time of controversy around the singer-songwriter: “How can we stop this infection of all these written things into our precious music?” Nobody thinking about all those songs that Woody [Guthrie] or Pete Seeger wrote! So I pushed and shoved for a singer-songwriter afternoon, with Joni and Leonard Cohen. I also asked Janis Ian, Tom Paxton. Finally, I convinced them.
And do you know Joni’s singing again? Brandi Carlile told me last week that she went around to Joni’s house with some of her band and they were all singing.
Leonard Cohen was on his way to Nashville when you intercepted him. What did you immediately think was different and interesting about his songs? He wasn’t quite sure, was he, that he was really a songwriter?
No, not at all sure – totally clueless!
Mary Martin, who worked with [Dylan manager] Al[bert] Grossman, used to complain about him all the time. “There’s this guy, my friend in Montreal, and he’s a poet, but he’s just going nowhere. His poems are so obscure!” So when she called me and said he was in New York and that he wanted to play me some of his new songs, I asked her, “Are they obscure?” And she said, “You bet!”
The first day, we just talked. Then we went to dinner and at the end of the evening I said, “Mary told me that you’d written some songs, but you didn’t sing any.” And he said, “Can I come back tomorrow?” And he came back the next day and said, “I can’t sing, I can’t play guitar and I don’t know if this is a song.” And he sang Suzanne, Dress Rehearsal Rag and The Stranger Song, which is the only one I haven’t recorded. The first one that grabbed me was Dress Rehearsal Rag, because it was about a rehearsal for a suicide. And of course I was always suicidal when I was drinking and had already tried to kill myself at 14…
God, 14? What was that all about?
(Rolls eyes) It was all about the piano. A fight with my father about playing Liszt’s La Campanella. It was under my hands but I was not up to speed and my father wanted me to play it in public and he was very insistent. So I decided to kill myself! I took 100 pills. I’d been reading Camus in French – I was just one of those emotional, dramatic teenagers. I looked fine in my white gloves and high heels. Underneath, I was just this…
Raging French soul?
Absolutely! I was lucky. I started throwing up. I called my best friend Marcia whose father was a doctor who came right over. So, anyway, my response to Dress Rehearsal Rag was very visceral.
It’s quite a funny song, too. Looking in the mirror at the face covered in shaving cream: “Now you’re Santa Claus…” Did it help contextualise your suicide attempt? It was a confirmation of my experience: “And wasn’t it a long way down…” After Leonard left that day I knew I’d do Dress Rehearsal Rag for sure. But [Collins’s then-partner, the screenwriter] Michael Thomas said, “What about that song Suzanne?” I said, “It’s interesting.” And he said, “No, it’s not interesting; it’s a great song.” And I recorded it, of course.
I think it was the point where Elektra really had their act together, so the recording got a lot of exposure. And I think Neil Diamond recorded it after I did. Leonard phoned me and said, “I never want you to stop singing my songs, but I don’t understand why you’re not writing your own.”
The first few songs you wrote and recorded – Since You Asked, Sky Fell, Albatross – they’re very romantic. What are you shooting for at this stage with your writing?
Well, when Leonard asked me why I didn’t write songs, I kind of didn’t have a clue. Didn’t know how you even started writing a song. So I called Bruce Langhorne, who’d played guitar and tambourine on Carolyn Hester records and Bob Dylan records and was living up in White Plains [north of the Bronx], and I said, “Can I come and see you?” I had all these notebooks full of depression and darkness and desperation, really random, nothing finished. I’d been writing my dreams down for years because I’d been in therapy already, three years I guess. He read my dreary little notebook and said, “OK, you’re going to go home and you’re going to write five songs about a relationship – the beginning, the middle and so on, and the end.” I said, “Oh good, that’s simple.” Since You Asked was the first. It took me about 40 minutes.
So it was like a school assignment?
Yes, and I’m good like that. If you give me
“I said I needed a guitar and my father rented one for me. I think he presumed I’d give it up.”
an assignment, I will do it. So writing became part of my process. I write and I write and I write.
My Father [on Who Knows Where The Time Goes, 1968] is kind of a fiction. The father’s a miner. The narrator goes to live in France. But it feels strongly like it’s about your real relationship with your actual father.
It definitely is. I wrote it in April ’68. I called [venerable folkie] Tom Glazer and I sang it to him, but I didn’t call my father. And my father died on May 4 – he never heard it. He’d fallen sick on a trip to Hawaii in March, and when he came back he couldn’t shake it. So this was troubling me as I wrote the song. But it’s very much about that romantic view of life that he had. He’d always promised us that we’d live in France. France was a big deal to him, the idea of France as the goal. Literature, revolution, art, philosophy – France was the place.
He died when I was here in London, May 4, 1968. Here to play the Royal Albert Hall. My brother Denver was with me. Then I went out to California and made the album – which Stephen Stills plays on. Quite an emotional situation.
You’ve described your affair with Stephen Stills as “hot”.
(Laughs uproariously) Yeah, it was hot, and short. As soon as the affair started I called Michael Thomas in New York and said, “You’re gonna have to leave.” And you know, he was a total gentleman about it. Later, Stephen told me that he was already a big fan and had begged [Who Knows… producer] David Anderle to let him play on my record. It was June when we started the record. And we were in the studio for maybe two, three weeks. Then it was August, September when Cass [Elliot] invited Stephen and David [Crosby] to come and try singing with this English guy, Graham [Nash]. Stephen was trying to get me to move out to California, because I was in New York and in therapy and Stephen hated both.
Why did he hate therapy?
Well, because he probably needed it!
People who know Stephen Stills only by reputation have this impression that…
That he’s a brat? (Softly) Stephen has almost no hearing. It was diagnosed at nine years old that his hearing was going and it was never going to get any better. He’d had some kind of infection. I have a feeling that this kind of behaviour is kind of to do with that. Because he’s a doll – he’s funny, he’s sweet, an incredible musician. But I also think that combination of the three of them in CS&N – I mean, they argued about everything!
But you know, he’s very different now. I’d have never gone out on tour with him in 2017 if he had not dramatically changed his life. People either get through their problems or
“I had a half gallon of vodka at the hospital. There’s no way I should have been under anaesthetic!Ó
they don’t, and he has overhauled his whole psyche. Very much a different person. But I was still nervous about going on tour with him. Will I step on a land mine?
You had this incredible run with Elektra… Twenty-five years…
Were there never any bust-ups?
Not really. Jac never pushed me to do anything. I never did anything I didn’t want to do. I was just about done with the In My Life album [1966], with the Josh Rifkin orchestrations, and some risks with the material – like [Bertolt Brecht’s] Pirate Jenny, the songs from Marat/ Sade, a Beatles song – so that was kind of leaping off a cliff. All Jac said to me was, “This is not really finished. It needs something else.” And that was when Mary Martin rang me about Leonard Cohen.
The one real bust-up we had was in ’72, when Jac sold the company [to Warner Bros]. He called me only the night before it was official. I was in a rage with him and I didn’t speak to him for, like, five years. Because we were very close and I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t let me know about this.
How did you get on with the new regime?
Oh, I loved David Geffen. I went to David and said, “I don’t know what to do, but I know I want to record with Arif Mardin.” Everybody else said, “No, you can’t do this.” I didn’t even know about his work with Aretha and the Bee Gees. I only knew that he’d produced a song by Danny O’Keefe – Angel Spread Your Wings. I was a bit out of it!
A bit out of it?
Well, the last four years of my drinking I was absolutely coming off the rails and they had to babysit me all the way through the Judith album [1975]. I would sing in the morning, then lunch would come and I would have to drink and then I would have to go home. Then Judith was a huge hit, Send In The Clowns especially, and we went in to make the next album – Bread and Roses.
…Which starts off quite political. It’s like you use the profile from Judith to make a point.
I suppose I did. Well, the plan was to go out with that album in 1977, but I could not sustain anything any more. There was no way for me not to drink. And I was losing my voice. That whole year I cancelled concerts, I was going on silences and finally my doctor figured out what was wrong. It was a hemangioma on the vocal cord caused by the drinking and so on. And he said we’re going to do this surgery on your vocal cords. And the surgery worked. It was the same surgery that Julie Andrews had that didn’t work. My doctor said, “It’s a laser, it’s new and there’s no history with it, but if you don’t have it you’ll never sing ever again.”
Did you have to give up drinking before you had the surgery?
Oh, God no! Are you kidding me!? I had cases of half gallons of vodka in my closet and I had one at the hospital. The nurse came in and said, “I smell alcohol.” And I said it was a couple of friends of mine. I mean, I was very drunk. There’s no way I should have been under an anaesthetic (laughs).
It was another few months before I was intervened. By a doctor who said, “If you don’t do this it’s all over.” I hadn’t really worked for two years and even after I got sober I was still very shaky. When I did the Hard Times For Lovers album in September of that year – a big production, wonderful musicians – I was working from rehab. I was on the phone, getting in trouble for exerting myself. But my brain was working again. Judith closed out with the song Born To The Breed, a song you wrote about your son Clark. At certain times in your life, it must have been hard to sing.
It’s my granddaughter’s favourite song. Clark was troubled, from about the age of 11. He came back to live with me when he was seven or eight – I’d lost custody for a couple of years. But then he started using and I was still drinking and I didn’t know. These days we’d have said, “Let’s just get him to rehab immediately,” but that didn’t happen. He went to a place called Sheppard Pratt [psychiatric hospital in Baltimore] but they didn’t have a rehab then. He was 16 and he ran, and wrote me this letter, he said, “Don’t try to find me.”
Anyway, I had in my mind something I wanted to say. And Born To The Breed came out. People really identify with the song. Of course it’s emotional, but it’s easier for me to sing than the song I wrote after his death, Wings Of Angels. I can’t sing that song. I hardly do it. Born To The Breed is less hard because there’s hope in it. He’s gone to be in a rock’n’roll band and maybe he’ll get sober, which he did eventually. He had seven years of sobriety which was marvellous, then the shock of suicide will always tear you apart.
(Indicates the word “Clark” tattooed inside of her wrist) I went to have this tattoo done with Gladys Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain’s mother. She’d connected with me through a mutual friend; she didn’t know anyone else who’d had a son who killed themselves. She was an editor at the New York Times for 25 years, a very interesting woman. She said, “I’m going to get a tattoo of Tony’s name on my wrist. Do you want to go with me?” So I did.
At the end of the ’70s you fixed your voice, you dried out, just in time for the music business…
…To fall apart, yes. It was terribly hard. The guy who took over Elektra did not renew my contract in 1984. I was desperate. I came over here and made an album called Amazing Grace [1985] with an orchestra, which was great fun. But what a struggle! Just to maintain who you are and what you do. What your vision is. You can’t be diluted by these events in the music business but the ’80s were tough and the disappointment with Sony was bad [Fires Of Eden, 1990] and something called Gold Castle Records was horrible.
You made children’s records…
It was something I could do while the music business decided what it was going to wear this year. My thing is, I don’t need fireworks; I just need to tell a story to people. That’s what people want. Last night I sang a new song called Colorado, and it’s good. But it’s not a song I’d have written looking over my shoulder worrying about what else is going on.
The YouTubes from this year’s Newport Folk Festival – you singing with the likes of Robin Pecknold – underline the revival of folk-derived or folk-indebted music we seem to have had during the past 15 years. Has it made a difference to you?
Well, I keep doing what I’m doing but yes. There’s been a shift in the way people are able to listen. For a while people didn’t want to hear lyrics. But that’s changed. Meanwhile,
I do my thing and hopefully I’m getting better at it. The other day I did a show in Geneva, Wisconsin and [folk singer-turned-TV celebrity] Dickie Smothers came to visit me, and he said, “Now you have a real show!” And I do. I sing songs and tell stories. Stephen Sondheim and [Broadway director/producer] Hal Prince came to see me at the Café Carlyle in New York and I was doing this Sondheim album and I wanted to know what they thought of the songs, but they had no interest in the songs. They both said, “Oh my God! We didn’t know you had shtick!” So finally, after all these years, I have a show.
Has there ever been a song you wished you could sing but for some reason it wouldn’t work for you?
Yes. I want to sing Gordon Lightfoot’s song The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald. And I just don’t think I can sing it. It might be because it doesn’t have a chorus. It might be that simple! But you know, I’ve wanted to sing Jimmy Webb’s The Highwayman for decades, and finally I’m singing it – in fact I’ve just recorded it. It’s on this new record that’s coming in November [Winter Stories] with Jonas Fjeld and [North Carolina ‘newgrass’ band] Chatham County Line. But The Edmund Fitzgerald is one of those dazzling songs. It’s a big story, and I love to hear it. Maybe it’s time I took a crack at it.