Judy Collins retains her strong voice
At 82, Judy Collins retains the crystalline tone that made her an icon of the early 1960s folk music movement, sounding so youthful during a recent interview with The Chronicle that it’s hard not to ask her whether she’s made an untoward bargain with the devil.
That unforgettable voice has served Collins just as well offstage too, where her prowess as a raconteur is equally undiminished, so of course she launched a podcast this summer.
Now Collins is scheduled for a three-night run at Yoshi’s in Oakland, Monday through Wednesday, Sept. 20-22, just as her podcast “Since You’ve Asked” hits its stride, featuring recent episodes with musician Ben Harper, actor Jeff Daniels and creativity self-help guru Julia Cameron. An idea suggested by her manager while the restless Collins was looking for possible projects in the midst of the pandemic, a podcast seemed like a good fit given her experience with the media.
“My father had a radio show for 30 years, so the idea of doing interviews was something I was used to, and I’ve been interviewed so much myself,” she said by phone from Norway while under mandatory quarantine
before a spate of concerts with Jonas Fjeld, a Norwegian musician deeply versed in American roots music. “I have always tried not to answer any question the same way. It’s a religion to me. I try to be inventive and clever for my own pleasure.”
She has no shortage of material to work with. A firsthand witness to some of the most dramatic events of the past six decades, Collins vividly recounts experiences that evoke music’s power to inspire people and bring them together. Like traveling through Mississippi with the Eastgate Singers from Chicago, Bay Area vocalist Barbara Dane and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer during the Freedom Summer campaign to register Black citizens to vote in the 1964 election.
“It was a few days before they found the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, and I was terrified,” she recalled, referring to the young civil rights workers killed in Philadelphia, Miss., by Ku Klux Klan members and local law enforcement officers. “We’d pull up in a little town and Fannie would sing something like ‘This Little Light Of Mine,’ inspiring people to go out and risk their lives to vote. What a woman! An ocean of generosity came out of her mouth when she sang.”
The pandemic has afforded Collins several opportunities to look back at seminal moments in her career. She recorded her first album, “A Maid of Constant Sorrow,” 60 years ago, and last month released a live album documenting her return to the Town Hall in New York City. Recorded as part of the centennial celebration for the venue deeply tied to struggles for social justice, “Live at the Town Hall, NYC” revisits the repertoire from her fourth album, “The Judy Collins Concert,” which she recorded at the theater in 1964.
Comparing her renditions of John Phillips’ “Me and My Uncle” from 57 years ago and last winter leaves the mystifying impression that her voice leapfrogged the decades. But on the Town Hall version, the audience’s audible reaction to the dramatic twists in the outlaw tale, which Collins learned from the future Mamas & the Papas star Phillips while they were tripping on LSD, provides a reminder that she was introducing many of the songs that went on to become standards.
It’s hard to overstate her impact as a champion of songwriters, from
Greenwich Village folkies Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton to Canadian troubadours Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.
Collins’ recordings of Cohen’s “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” eased his transition from poet to songwriter, and at her insistence Cohen started to perform his own material.
“She brought him onstage at one of her concerts,” recalled Sylvie Simmons, the San Francisco author of the authoritative Cohen biography, “I’m Your Man.” “Cohen was terrified and walked off mid-song. But Judy simply brought him back on again.”
He returned the favor by urging her to start composing her own songs “and I’ve been writing ever since,” Collins said.
(Simmons plans to conclude a virtual series, as part of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s immersive exhibition “Experience Leonard Cohen,” with Collins to discuss her “lifelong friendship” with the late Cohen on Nov. 7.)
By any measure, Collins has had an extraordinary run in her eighth decade. She reunited with Stephen Stills, who immortalized her on the Crosby, Stills & Nash hit “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” on 2017’s “Everybody Knows.” She followed up with 2019’s “Winter Stories,” a collaboration with Fjeld and bluegrass group Chatham County Line, which topped the Billboard bluegrass chart.
Dedicated to her original songs, Collins’ forthcoming album was initially titled “Love and Resistance,” but she’s had a change of heart. Rather than centering on her protest anthem about immigrants, “Dreamers” (which she released on YouTube in 2018 with a hauntingly sparse arrangement), the rechristened album “Spellbound” is designed “to focus on beauty itself, songs that can help people,” she said.
“I’ve always been intrigued by great songs about resistance and the fight against social injustice,” she continued. “I’ve written many myself. But the truth is, to stay on this planet, we have to have art and poetry and beauty.”
At Yoshi’s, Collins plans to perform songs that bear her indelible stamp as well as some of her new material, including possibly a song about the people who perished in Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire that she’s been working on for several years.