Judy Collins’ new album ‘Spellbound’ has been widely praised (reviewed here), particularly as it is her first album in a six-decade career of all-new, self-penned material. But as fantastic as that milestone is, it does turn a blind eye to the fact that she has been writing her own songs and featuring them on albums since 1967. Speaking to Judy via zoom for an in-depth conversation about the new release speedily unfolds into a dizzying back and forth across all ages of folk music, touching down on topics as diverse as her receiving fan mail from Pete Seeger; courtroom drama at the behest of Phil Ochs; Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize; fond recollections of a diffident Leonard Cohen and much more besides; even the Muppet Show gets a look in. The overriding sense I took from this was that Judy Collins is absolutely the real deal; listening to her recall with such analytical passion a life dedicated to her craft leaves me in no doubt that she is and has always been a true master of song.
It would appear that the new album ‘Spellbound’ is the product of an avalanche of writing. Was this album rather like turning on a tap in that the material just kept coming?
I was writing a lot of poetry, starting in 2016, and then it evolved into a number of songs, and I added to them. Then during the pandemic, I worked on that. We did a recording session at the end of 2019, the first one; it had ‘Arizona’ on it, I think it had ‘Wild With Mist’ and a couple of other songs, and then I continued writing and refining. We actually did one session during the pandemic at a studio out in one of the suburbs that was open. So, we did that, people came in, and we worked on that and did a couple more, then we were done. So ‘Spellbound’ was finished and ready to go.
Was there a point where you decided that this is just going to be my own words, my own music?
Well, when I started writing poetry every day, that’s when I decided this next album is going to be Judy Collins. And it is, with a lot of songs left over, which is nice. And, of course, it is something that I will pursue now rigidly, rigorously, I would say, going forwards.
Your career began just before the Sixties singer-songwriter explosion. Is that the reason you were focused on interpretation rather than composition?
Well, I didn’t ever write songs; that was not in my DNA; I didn’t do it; I didn’t think about it. And I was, after all, raised in a family where my father was an interpreter. He did write some good songs, I must say, but only a few and most of his work was done doing the Great American Songbook, so that was his focus; he chose all the best songs in the categories. I learned them all, but I was always playing the piano, playing Mozart, Debussy and Rachmaninov but what changed my path was that I heard on the radio, when I was fifteen and a half, a song from a movie called the Black Knight. It was an Alan Ladd movie, and it was the story of the Gypsy Rover. There was a recording of ‘The Gypsy Rover’, which I fell in love with and learned, then started to sing with my girlfriends who were dancers who danced the story. We did this all over town, at the school shows and clubs and so we became famous. We had been together doing something called the Little Red Riding Hood Story when we were younger, but we needed a new piece of material, ‘The Gypsy Rover’ fit right in. When I heard it, it changed my life. I went down to get the album with the song from the movie; I took my babysitting money down, and the guy at the store, when he sold me the album, said, “look here on the wall, and you’ll see all these albums; albums by Josh White, the Clancy Brothers, Cynthia Gooding and Bob Gibson, this is called folk music and what you’ve stepped into is called the Great American Folk Music Revival”. ‘The Gypsy Rover’ was basically a traditional song, re-worked, of course, but there are a thousand versions, I’m sure. They had other names for him, but that led me to traditional songs, and I started learning Wailing songs and things like ‘Maid Of Constant Sorrow.’ I joined the Denver Folklore Society and started going to meetings; I stopped playing Rachmaninov, Beethoven and Mozart and dug into Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and then, of course, Bob Dylan. That was afterwards, first of all, it was the traditional, and then, when I came to New York in ’63, I began to record all the songs of the city singers like Bob Gibson and Tom Paxton and so on, that’s how it all started.
As well as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, you were mixing with a wealth of other writers in that Greenwich Village scene, underrated greats like Fred Neil and Phil Ochs.
I recorded a Fred Neil song, ‘Tear Down The Walls,’ I loved his work; it was wonderful. I recorded Dylan very early; the first three songs I recorded of his were ‘Masters Of War,’ probably in ’61, ’62 and ‘Fare Thee Well’ and a song called ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’. That one was, of course, written by Lady Franklin; it was called ‘Lady Franklin’s Lament;’ Martin Carthy recorded it as ‘Lady Franklin’s Lament’ (‘Lord Franklin’), and then Dylan took the melody and created ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ out of it. I have just recorded the original, as written and with, I suppose Martin Carthy’s music? I’m not sure if he took it from a traditional source or if he wrote it? I’ll have to find out from Martin.
Phil Ochs was wonderful; I was recording ‘In The Heat Of The Summer’ [one] of Phil’s, he and I were very friendly. He introduced me and brought me over to the opening party of the Yippies on St Patrick Day’s morning in 1968. It was about ten o’clock in the morning, and I was busy making green cupcakes for my son to take to school and Phil came in and said, “you’ve got to come down to this press conference for the Yippies, and you have to sing something, so why don’t you sing ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’”.
That leads to another story because I sang at the Yippie trial, the Chicago seven’s trial although Aaron Sorkin forgot to put me in the movie; but I did sing there, and I tried to sing ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’, but the clerk put his hand over my mouth, and judge Hoffman said: “there is no singing in this courtroom”. So, it was a storied moment which Aaron missed by a long shot, but I adored Phil Ochs.
And then, in ’66, two years before that, I had gotten a call from Mary Martin, who was a friend who had grown up with Leonard Cohen and who was his go-to help in New York. She worked for Al Grossman and Warner music; she knew that I would take somebody’s song and then put it on a record since I had a record label from ’61 with Jac Holzman at Elektra. If I put a song of somebody else’s on one of my records, it was bound to get recorded and played. A lot of these guys didn’t have record labels yet, so Mary sent Leonard over to me because she knew I was almost finished with a new album and that Jac had said, “we’re not done yet; we need something else.” So, when Leonard arrived at my door, he sang me, finally, after some convincing, three songs. He sang ‘Suzanne,’ ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’, and ‘The Stranger Song’, and he said, “I don’t know if these are songs and I can’t sing, and I can’t play the guitar,” that’s how he introduced himself. After he sang, I said, “well, these are songs, and I’m recording ‘Suzanne’ tomorrow,” which I did. So that’s how that began. Then he called me and said, “well, now you’ve made me famous!” And I said, “well, good, that’s what it’s all about, that’s what I’m trying to do here.” He said, “but what I don’t understand is why you’ve never written any of your own songs?” So, I went home, and I wrote ‘Since You Asked,’ which was my very first song, and I’ve been writing songs ever since. I put them on albums with other people’s songs but usually, on any of my albums, that is not all Leonard Cohen, or all Lennon & McCartney or all Dylan unless it’s one of those compilations or other people’s music; I do put my songs, as I write them, on my new albums as they come along. But now, Leonard would be very happy, I’m sure.
It seems to me that the biggest challenge for anyone attempting to write original songs or music is that every chord, every chord sequence and melody has probably already been written. How do you face that down?
Leonard said something in a book of Sylvie Simmons called ‘I’m Your Man,’ he said that he had run into a Spanish songwriter and singer, he had taken a lesson with this guy. The fellow came to his house, taught him some chords and then he didn’t show up for the next lesson. Leonard called the hotel where the gentleman was staying, and the housekeeper said, “oh didn’t you know? He killed himself yesterday.” Leonard, of course, was shocked, but then he says, “that gentleman taught me six chords, and they’re the same chords that I’ve used on every single song I’ve ever written since.” Only Leonard Cohen could tell such a story. I would say [his chords] are mostly dark, but then ‘Sisters Of Mercy’ is not dark [sings a little of the melody], that’s a very positive, major chord in that song although they could be very slightly the same chords that he learned from the Spanish gypsy gentleman, but I would say that there are always surprises. Sondheim, whose music I’ve recorded a good deal of, not just ‘Send In The Clowns’ but an album of songs called ‘A Love Letter To Stephen Sondheim’, which came out in 2016; he spends a lot of time analysing what he does, that’s the way his mind works. Dylan, on the other hand, wrote in ‘Chronicles,’ he says “it all started in about 1962, it went on for ten years, and then it stopped”. He said, “I don’t know how it started, I don’t know why it started, and I don’t know why it stopped; it’s a complete mystery to me”, and that’s the most honest reference to the process that I’ve ever heard. We don’t know, the muse comes in the window one day, and there she is, and here we are, sitting at our typewriter or our piano or our guitar or our computer, and she takes over. Whether she’s Leonard Cohen’s muse or Sting’s muse, or whoever she is when she comes into your life, she does whatever she wants to do, and you just take notes, you take dictation!
Is that what happened to you when you were in a Honolulu hotel room, were you there to write or did the muse just hit you?
On January 1st of, 2016, I sat down and said to my husband; I’m going to do what I usually do the first of the year; I’m going to go and do ninety poems in ninety days or ninety songs in ninety days, whatever I can get out, I’ll do one every day. He said to me, “why don’t you write for 365 days? Then at the end of the year, you’ll have 365 poems”, and so I did. I haven’t done every day since then, but I did a whole year, and I was in Honolulu during that time, so it was today’s poem which was ‘Spellbound.’ Now, the other thing I would tell a young songwriter is poems and lyrics are different. They are not the same; they will never be the same; even the Nobel Prize people cannot make them the same. Because Dylan was a songwriter, he was not a poet, and there is a difference. First of all, they should have created a separate category for Bob Dylan if they wanted to give him a prize; as it was, they took a Nobel Prize for poetry out of a poet’s life. The opportunity for a poet that year that they gave him the poetry prize; it’s not poetry; it’s lyric writing, and that’s where he’s the genius. Yes, I wrote poems every day, but my job then was to sit down at the piano; I printed them all out every day when I’d finished my work, maybe at the end of three or four days, put them on the piano and see what happens. If they’re not a lyric, you’ll know pretty quickly.
So, lyrics are not poetry because they have to be in service of the song? Would you not even say that Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, when printed out on the page, read like poetry?
Well, they’re not poems, if they’re lyrics, they must be lyrics, and that is really the key. Because of [lyrics being written in service of the song], it changes, and poetry stands on its own. But lyrics do not unless they’re shaped, and what you do is, you cut here, you cut there to make this rhyme, and it is transformed into a song. One of the things I’ll say about that is, people try to set poetry to music quite often, in part it’s because they want to learn them, to memorise them. It’s quite unsuccessful in most cases, most people who set poems to music, it doesn’t really come off very well. It just doesn’t work. Here’s what happens when a person writes a song that’s a traditional song; sometimes they change and change and change through history. But the main thing is, there’s a melody. A melody, for some reason, gets into the human brain and helps us to remember things. That’s why people who have dementia or who have lost their memory respond to music.
An old friend who was one of the great banjo players of the century had really lost his memory, had serious speaking and memory disorder, couldn’t talk. A bunch of his friends went up to his place in northern New York state, they took their instruments, and they sat down and began to sing. He whipped out his guitar and began to sing along. This is a man who couldn’t speak for a number of years. Roger Payne, the guy who gave me the first recording of the humpback whales [the 1970 album ‘Songs Of The Humpback Whale’], he said that the whales are telling a story and the memory of the whales around them picks up on the melody of the singing whales, and they know what the message is. They’re telling the whales to go here and there; where’s the warmest water to have their calves in, or are we all going to go to Cape Cod in that area because it’s warm and it’s a nursery? All this information is embedded in the song that the whale sings. And it’s true for humans too.
I recently saw a documentary about Glen Campbell on his final tour when he was battling Alzheimer’s; he needed an auto-cue when he spoke, but when he took a guitar solo, it was like magic, all still there.
Yes, it was all there in the brain; there’s some capacity that we have where melody takes over and tells us where to go and what to sing. I mean, I don’t have dementia, thank you, God, but if I did have dementia and I know that I have all these songs, it’s a good thing to know that I could still sing them.
Did the pandemic lead you down the path of reflection that you find yourself in on the new album?
Well, I’m sure it helped, but the truth is that I spend an awful lot of time in my head, and of course, my head is filled with memories of everything I’ve ever done. I have a very clear memory of a lot of it, although I did drink for a long time. I still manage; I don’t even know how to remember a lot. One of my friends, a painter named Jules Olitski, used to say, “if you live until you’re twenty, you have enough material for a lifetime of creativity.” The truth is a lot of my memory in a lot of these songs; for instance, ‘When I Was A Girl In Colorado,’ certainly is about my growing up in Colorado, and the song ‘Hell On Wheels,’ is about an incident I had driving a car. I was drinking and almost killed a couple of children on a dirt road in the mountains.
So that is a real memory in that song?
It’s a real memory, and it’s horrifying to me; I really almost killed those children. I mean, I landed that car. I flew off the dirt road into the ditch, and I looked out the window, and there were these two little babies sitting on a blanket by the road. I mean, what were they doing out there in the first place? And the father comes out screaming and yelling, tells me he’s going to get a rope and pull me out and then he’s going to come back and call the cops because I’d almost killed his kids. And so, I see that he grabs the children and takes them away, and I begin to rock the car back and forth so I can get out of the ditch between the fence and the road, and I’m out of there in a second, but of course, the memory has never left me. Did I ever call the man and tell him I was sorry? No, I had no idea who he was. Other than that, there are more enlightening memories in the song, certainly. If I can string together a piece of writing that I can then remodel into a song, sit down at the piano and make it have a melody so that I have to shape it, have to cut this off and that off to make it rhyme in a certain place, I have a lot of experience in what a song really sounds like. My history of singing the songs that I’ve sung, that I made my living with, it’s not that I go and listen to things and say that I want to write a song like Jimmy Webb; God forbid, I wouldn’t know where to start. But something about the shape of songs came to me from birth, in fact probably pre-birth because I heard my father singing ‘Danny Boy’, I’m sure, when I was in the womb.
The ‘Grand Canyon’ song recalls someone called Dick Barker, who played the first cowboy folk songs you heard. That’s not a name I’m familiar with.
No, he wasn’t a professional at all, but he was a rancher’s kid. He grew up living near Yellowstone in Wyoming, and he had a float trip down the Snake River, he and his family. So, I kind of transposed his life on the Snake River into the Grand Canyon, and I did take a trip with him down the Snake but not down the Colorado. But you know, it all kinds of melds together, doesn’t it?
Yes, absolutely; the song ‘So Alive’ seems to be painting a picture of a very bohemian, hard-drinking lifestyle in sixties Greenwich Village. Is that fair?
Oh, very fair, very fair. I have a friend who used to say that his favourite song of mine was ‘The Blizzard’, and after ‘Spellbound’ came out now, he likes ‘So Alive’ the best. It is a portrait; my sister said, “who is it that you’re writing about?” There was one person that I knew had a single bed that I spent some time in, and that was David Blue. David Blue died way too young; he was a lovely singer songwriter, very kind man. A very sweet man, he died from a heart attack, he was probably 46 or something like that.
He’s a name that regularly crops up from that scene for sure; he was seen in the Dylan Rolling Thunder movie recently, I think? Is there a tendency to wrongly describe all the folk singers surprised by Dylan turning electric as a bit square? There’s actually a great story of rock ‘n’ roll in that scene?
Oh yes, it’s true; it was a major breakthrough. I suppose it allowed a kind of flowering; it created the Folk-Rock scene, I think and allowed us to bring the electric guitars into the studio. I don’t always have a chance to do that, but occasionally I do. I certainly record with a brilliant set of musicians, one or two of whom is always an electric guitar player. I tried to pick up an electric guitar myself, I had no luck with it whatsoever. Somebody borrowed it, and it never came back into my home.
Were people really so horrified by the Folk-Rock boom? Looking at it now, firstly, obviously, a lot of brilliant music arrived, and secondly, it seems that many went electric, or at least dipped their toe in the water to some degree?
I was on the board of directors at the Newport Folk Festival for a while in New York; I was friendly with George Wein and, of course, Jac Holzman; my manager was Harold Leventhal; Ronnie Gilbert and I were the two women who were on the board, they were kind of old fashioned, I don’t know why? I wanted to put together a Newport afternoon in 1967 with Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Janis Ian and Tom Paxton, and I had a real argument with them. No, they wanted old this and old that, everything a century and a half old. I got through to them, and I finally made it happen; Dylan had already played electric in ’65. Maybe they were shy because they felt that it had disrupted the idea of tradition and so on, but they got over it.
On the new album, the underlying story in ‘The Shipwrecked Mariner’ seems to be how you nurtured a survivor’s instinct?
I think that’s right; yes, that’s what that song is really about. Helen Frankenthaler, among others, always had names for her paintings, she would quite often take them from either songs or poems, and ‘Shipwrecked Mariner’ definitely came from somebody’s poem that I read. I came across those words, and I thought that’s a song for me. So it is clearly about survival, nothing else, because I didn’t live on a ship although I wrote another song called ‘Secret Harbor’ about a pirate ship, that was really about the end of a love affair. It really does bring the devil into the song, and the fallen angel comes in there quite often. I wrote ‘Secret Harbor’ with the help of Ari Hest on a duets album with Ari, but I re-recorded it recently because I liked the song so much. I wrote a song at the end of 2016; the last song I wrote was a song called ‘Dreamers’. I actually think ‘Dreamers’ may be the best thing I have ever written; it’s about immigration. I put it out on an EP, and I put a little film in it about immigrants. I recorded it again recently because it’s a subject that is, unfortunately, very much in the media, pretty much everywhere. Not just here but everywhere in the world. What has happened to the planet and the lives of people who live in war zones? The need to get out and go somewhere else it’s a predominant issue? So, my song ‘Dreamers’ is, in my mind, one of the few things I’ve ever written that had a determined reason for being written.
Some political and topical writers I have spoken to speak of resistance from listeners or broadcasters who prefer material to steer away from heavier content. Is that something you’ve encountered?
People don’t tell me that; they may think it, but they wouldn’t tell me because they know they wouldn’t get a very happy or an agreeable response. No, we need to be shaken up, we need to be redirected, we need to have something besides TikTok and lies. Nothing against TikTok; I think it can be quite interesting, although it can be very destructive. But isn’t that true about many things?
‘Thomas Merton’ is a classic portrait song, which also speculates that he may have been murdered. Do you still believe that a song is the best and most direct medium to get a story or a message across?
I do, and in these almost sixty, well fifty-eight years of writing, I’ve gone into deeper message carrying songs. When I was a UNICEF representative, I represented a book called ‘I Dream Of Peace’, which was the drawings of children from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I wrote a song when I went there called ‘I Dream Of Peace.’ I call it ‘Song For Sarajevo,’ heavy, heavy song; in fact, it’s so heavy that I often choose not to sing it. I did a show at the Temple Emanu-El in New York recently, and I was going to sing it because of what was going on in Ukraine, but it was so depressing I couldn’t sing it.
I think the ‘Song For Sarajevo’ song is terribly important against the wars that go on in this world, endlessly, it seems. I was talking to my friend Ron Chernow, who wrote ‘Hamilton’ and participated in writing the musical Lin-Manuel Miranda; he is a Ukraine, he comes from a family who came out of Ukraine in 1910. His description of his family and of Ukraine, how much agony they’ve gone through in centuries is astonishing. He is describing his grandmother’s life in Ukraine, and how she had to come out, I won’t go into too vivid and disturbing detail, but there I sat, across the table from the man who has the horrible history that Ukraine bears the brunt of and now it’s repeating itself. War is the terrible truth about the planet.
[Also], my husband designed the Korean memorial in the mall in Washington DC, and when it was dedicated in Washington during the Clinton administration, I wrote a song called ‘Walls’ about that. I’ve written heavy songs about certain situations, and Thomas Merton really caught me by surprise. I was very intrigued with Merton. I read ‘The Seven Storey Mountain’ when I was younger, in my twenties probably, and during the pandemic, I was reading, I have been for years, Thomas Merton’s meditations. They’re really interesting because he wanders all over the place, he talks about people who are visiting him, French intelligentsia, all kinds of people, and he talks about the weather and the monastery, Gethsemane; I mean, he’s always off in a strange direction for a meditation book, I love the writing. So, I said, “I wonder what people are thinking about Merton nowadays?” I didn’t realise that he had written seventy books, sold millions and millions of copies and that he had only started writing ‘The Seven Storey Mountain’; when he had got to the monastery, Gethsemane. So, I went online to google (my best friend), that was when I found the book published in 2015 called ‘The Martyrdom Of Thomas Merton’, in which the writers discuss the fact that, first of all, there was no autopsy. They sent the body immediately to Tennessee; no pictures were taken that were evident or available. The person who found the body disappeared and was never found again. There was so much material, and finally, they said, “We think he was killed by the CIA.” He was in Thailand, which was crawling with CIA in 1968. We were flying our bombers out of Thailand to bomb Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the church declared, after Thomas Merton’s death, that he would never become a Saint because he had spoken out against the war in Vietnam, which of course made him my best friend. I wrote the song over the course of time; I hadn’t found out about that murder theory, that they found pictures of him with bullet holes in his head. This story about him stepping on an electric fan in the room he was staying in is basically hogwash, as they say in the south. I find that people are intrigued with this song in a way that they are not intrigued with, say ‘Spellbound.’ It’s because they see that there may be a path to discovering some information that they didn’t know before.
Yes, which returns to my point about the value of story and topical songs, I mean, I would know nothing about this story or its theories if your song hadn’t brought it to my attention, and it is intriguing. With streaming nowadays, you have a more direct line to people; how do you feel about how music is consumed today?
I have no opinion about it; it’s a total mystery to me; nowadays, my audience primarily has no CD player!
On the new song ‘Arizona’, we are back in 1962, a very turbulent year for you; heavy drinking, a marriage break-up, and then tuberculosis, and still, the lyric tells of how “my dark years are gone.”
Yes, this was a dark time for me; I wrote it in 2016, they put me in a place where nobody else could get to me except the doctors. That’s happened to me a couple of times; it happened to me with polio when I was ten and then again when I had tuberculosis. I write journals all the time, but I wrote quite extensively, first in Arizona and then in Colorado; in all, I was in quarantine with TB for about five months, so it was a very difficult and dark time. ‘Arizona’ comes back to the present in that life is very different now; the dark years are gone because I don’t drink anymore. Today happens to be the 44th anniversary of my sobriety; I’ve been sober for 44 years; April 20th, 1978, was when I got sober. So yes, the lights came on, and I’m one of the lucky people who doesn’t have to drink anymore.
In 1978, that was shortly after the period of your highest-profile, certainly in the UK with ‘Send In The Clowns’, but you have described yourself in the mid-seventies as being almost “totally out of it”. Do you think the quality of the work suffered?
No, it didn’t; well, I couldn’t perform; there were about two years. It took a long time because I had to have this surgery on my throat in October after I came back from England to do The Muppet Show. I was very friendly with Jim Henson; he asked me as I’d been in a lot of the skits on Sesame Street. In May of ’78, he said I want you to come out to England and do the Muppets, I said, “I’m sick; I can’t do it”. I spent a year cancelling shows, unable to perform and then I got myself together. It took a lot of Prednisolone and other drugs, and I kept silent for a month before I went over to England; after that, I came over and had the surgery and then I got sober. When that happened, I had top ten hits with ‘Send In The Clowns;’ as you say, my profile in England had been very high; I think it was on the charts for seventy weeks or something like that. So, in a way, the worst in my own personal life came when things were quite hot.
How do you feel about having one song that is the first thing people associate you with? Is that a frustration when you have such a huge back catalogue?
Well, I have to live with it, so it’s fine, there are lots of things but, ‘Send In The Clowns’ will then lead people to other songs one hopes and of course, I do concerts. When the pandemic hit, I was doing 120 shows a year; I’ll be back up to that by 2023. From May, I’m on the road again, so I have a life on the road; I make a living doing that, and it’s how I stay on the planet really.
With live performance, how do you negotiate over-familiarity, performing songs that you have sung for decades?
I have always had a mixture; I’ll go out to do a pair of shows somewhere, and the second show will always be totally different to the first one because I have enough material for years of shows and never repeat myself. There’ll always be something that I’m doing that I haven’t done for a number of years, or it’s brand new, so it is creative. Also, I found out when I started working at the Carlyle in New York, probably in 2005 or 2006, I discovered my pleasure in the stories that I have to tell. That is a very creative area, and it never ceases to amaze me the things that I will remember and can talk about. People love to hear stories, they love songs, but they really love to hear what it is you think about, what it is you remember. And I also have shtick, as Leonard, Steven Sondheim and Hal Prince used to say, “We knew you sing OK, but we didn’t know you had shtick.”
How do you feel about Dylan’s live approach today, where he’s often accused of deconstructing songs beyond the point of recognition?
Well, he has his own methods, and he doesn’t care particularly how they sound. I think he’s just remarkable; I can’t get over ‘Murder Most Foul,’ his seventeen-minute story of the murder of JFK. It takes a lot to listen to, but I think it’s a brilliant departure in his work. He has to figure out things to go to, departures to make because he has a lot to say, and he has to use the platform that he has, which is live performance and records that he makes, so he’s got to figure out something to do. We all do, and he’s done a beautiful job of it.
As somebody given credit for breaking new artists like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, is there anybody you particularly rate in the current folk world or songwriting arena?
Well, I Love Ari Hest; I’ve taken him under my wing, having known him for about ten years. I’ve written with him now, I’ve performed, we have an album of duets that we wrote together, and he’s on this album singing. He’s great; I think he’s a great combination and a great writer. I love Shawn Colvin, I think she’s brilliant and wonderful, and I love Brandi Carlisle; she’s really coming along with some wonderful contributions to the whole realm of music and helping other artists, which she’s very, very good at. But I am mostly involved with my own writing right now, so I don’t listen to a lot of other things unless somebody pokes me in that direction and says, “oh, you have to hear so and so.” You know, one of the people that I’m so sad that I missed him while he was living was Stan Rogers, who wrote ‘The Northwest Passage’; fortunately, I recorded it with the Chatham County Line; it’s a hell of a song; also I missed Dave Carter, who I found through a fan of mine who sent me a song of his called ‘When I Go’, a dazzling, amazing song. As happens with many writers, I’m not particularly interested in other things that he’s written, but that one I think is incredible. I recorded it with Willie Nelson, and we both just couldn’t get over it; the song it’s brilliant beyond belief. So, I keep looking, slowly but surely.
What are the folk albums that you really cannot live without?
Well, I really can’t live without Pete Seeger; what he and Woody Guthrie did that I think is very impressive is that they were writing songs to raise money for the unions. That’s why they went to work; I have a fan letter from Pete; well, I have a lot of letters from Pete with the banjo underneath, usually encouraging me to sing one of his songs. I recorded a number of his things; I recorded ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone,’ I recorded ‘Golden Thread’ with Joan Baez actually, but his fan letter was about a song of mine called ‘The Fallow Way’. It is really a treasure; I can’t get over it sometimes. Somebody coming back from the Clearwater folk festival, this young woman that was an intern at the festival, took him home in her car and on the way, she played ‘The Fallow Way’ to him over and over, so he couldn’t get away from it, and he wrote me this divine letter about it. I couldn’t live without Jimmy Webb’s album called ‘Alive And At Large’, which he recorded in Wales; dazzling songs, they are so brilliant. I do ‘The Highwayman’ now myself; I recorded it on ‘Winter Stories’ with the Chatham County Line, but I just think it’s awesome, and, of course, his song about Gaugin is beyond belief. I told him recently that song taught me more about singing than anybody except my teacher. It was such a climb to do that song, and it tells a story that is so fabulous and interesting. I think without Jimmy Webb in some way and certainly without Pete Seeger and my early collection of all those old sea shanties and traditional songs that were recorded by a lot of people, Ewan and Peggy and the Clancy Brothers and so on, I can’t live without them.
You don’t seem to be having voice management issues; your vocals are still sounding in great shape.
Well, it’s getting better and better, you know, even in the dark times. I had a great teacher starting in 1965 who I stayed with for 32 years, and so, even when I was having problems, I was going to see Max Margulies, and he was saying to me, “if you do what I’m telling you to do, you’ll be able to sing until you fall over”. His method is clarity and phrasing, it has to do with the bel canto style, and I got it and used it. It’s my saving grace, really. Even with the worst of my problems, once I had that vocal surgery removing the haemangioma (by the way, the same thing happened with Julie Andrews, and she wasn’t so lucky, she didn’t have the doctors who knew about this laser treatment that I had), I restored completely and have continued to sing better and to get better. It’s a miracle as far as I’m concerned, and as far as making a living, it means I can do that until I fall over. I wouldn’t be here without what I do because it is fulfilling on every level; it’s an interaction with other people, it’s creative. Working, it’s always been thinking about the next thing, and I have a very active social life; I love people, I love to laugh, love to go to the theatre, love to travel, so all those things I have and I can do them, so I’m a lucky girl.
Judy Collins is on tour now in the US. She will be appearing at Shrewsbury Folk Festival on 29th August 2022 and returning to Europe and the UK in November for a full tour. Full details can be found here.