Judy Collins – Profile of Legendary Singer

Born in Seattle, Washington, Judy Collins was the eldest of five children and started piano lessons at only four years old; debuting aged thirteen with the Denver Symphony, although she was distraught – almost suicidal – at her performance. Entranced by traditional folk songs and legends such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, she took up the guitar and soon after won a four-state “Stars of Tomorrow” contest.

No less than Bob Dylan came to hear her sing in a small Colorado club when she was unknown and it was her popularity there that led to her being signed by Elektra Records in 1961. She cut her first album, Maid of Constant Sorrow, in only five hours, and her days as a $100 a week singer were over.

Albums followed regularly, as did some film roles, but it was her voice that made her who she was: her lovely interpretations of songs including Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and John Lennon’s “In My Life” made her almost a symbol of the times. Although written by the then-unknown Joni Mitchell, her rendition of “Both Sides Now” on her 1967 album Wildflowers has stayed with her forever, eventually being entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and her seventh album, Whales and Nightingales, included perhaps her most famous hit, “Amazing Grace” recorded in St. Paul’s Chapel in New York:

“I like the fact it’s been in my life all these years, because it’s the story of real revolution in a person’s life.”

True to the songs she loved, Judy was not shy of making a stand herself: she was arrested while marching for civil rights in Mississippi, and again in 1973 for protesting the Vietnam War, although in a strange twist of fate she performed at Bill Clinton’s inaugural in 1992, where the President revealed that her version of “Chelsea Morning” inspired him and his wife Hillary to name their daughter Chelsea. The association didn’t end there, as Clinton then asked Judy to work for UNICEF, as Audrey Hepburn had once done, and it proved to be one of the most important things in her life.

Such a long career is also bound to have had its ups and downs. Being known as having the “prettiest eyes in the biz” made many fall under her spell, and Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills and Nash fell hard. He worked on her 1968 album Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and ultimately wrote a song about her called “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”.

It was a bittersweet tribute though, because she had refused to move in with him. “His idea of intimacy was my idea of bondage” she wrote in her autobiography, calling him “brilliant, but their relationship “volatile”. He in turn commented that “the legacy of our relationship is certainly in that song” – the lyrics mentioned her therapy, which she needed to deal with depression and her heavy drinking.

She had also suffered from tuberculosis and hepatitis during the sixties, and over thirty years later, she performed “Wings of Angels” a heartbreaking ballad about the suicide of her son on ABC’s Good Morning America. Writing a book seemed to help, and Sanity and Grace, A Journey of Suicide, Survival and Strength, is an emotional memoir about her son and the healing process following his death, and added to her novel Shameless (1985) and autobiographies Trust Your Heart (1987) and Singing Lessons in (1998).

She also wrote a song, “Saints and Angels In New Orleans,” to honor the city of New Orleans and the work done by the Red Cross in light of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. Over 40 years since she first came onto the scene, Judy is still writing, performing and releasing albums:

“I would rather be writing than anything”