At the age of 80, the timeless Judy Collins scored her first No. 1 album with “Winter Stories.”
Three years later she released her first album of all-original material, “Spellbound,” earning her seventh Grammy nomination.
Her voice still crystalline, her energy undiminished, Collins seems to be gaining momentum. Before the pandemic she was performing about 120 nights a year, because, she told The New York Times, “I’m getting better at it.”
In an era when we question the fitness of 80-year-old politicians, Collins, 84, is making her young colleagues look like slackers.
Recently she reflected on her career as she traveled from a gig back home to her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
“I’m the Betty White of folk music,” she said.
“I think it’s the result of good luck and training and determination and a lot of help,” she added, as her driver stopped the car at a gas station for snacks. She said genetics have much to do with her durability, along with the examples offered by such giants as Pablo Casals and Mstislav Rostropovich. “All the old classical people I knew, conductors and cellists in my life, everybody who basically loves what they do: They play until they fall over. And that’s what I want to do.”
Before she was a folk singer, Collins trained diligently as a classical pianist. Then she heard Jo Stafford’s recording of “Barbara Allen” and dove head-first into the songs of the British Isles. Her first album, “A Maid of Constant Sorrow,” came out in 1961.
But her sixth album, “Wildflowers,” from 1967, went in new directions. It included her cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” which landed in the pop music Top 10, and helped to launch Mitchell’s career.
It wasn’t the only time Collins scored a hit with a song by one of her friends. She sang “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen and brought his name into the limelight. In 1975, she turned Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” into Sondheim’s most recognized song.
The song stayed on the charts for 27 weeks and became one of Collins’ signature pieces. Its harmony and meter veer into challenging territory but it’s a comfortable briar patch for this singer. “I feel very blessed with it,” she said. “It’s a beautiful piece of jewelry.”
Though Collins has a reputation as a collector and an interpreter of songs, she is also an accomplished writer, as evidenced by the haunting “Since You’ve Asked,” also from “Wildflowers.”
In 2016 she accepted a challenge from her husband Louis Nelson to write a “song” every day for 365 days. She managed to write a poem a day, and out of this plenty she created the songs for “Spellbound.”
In addition to showcasing Collins’ own work, the album features the voice and musical ideas of Collins’ collaborator, Ari Hest, a singer/songwriter who is almost exactly half her age.
Similarly, her album “Winter Stories” involved teaming up with the relative youngsters in the Americana band Chatham County Line. Of those musicians she said, “They are such a wonderful group, so musical, so much fun, they are darling people.”
The cross-pollination between generations is critical to staying creative, she said. “It’s very powerful. You get to learn something different. You learn that good music is good music.”
She has also kept her old friends close. A week before speaking with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Collins was on stage at New York City’s Town Hall singing “Imagine” with Graham Nash and Art Garfunkel as part of the John Lennon Tribute Benefit Concert, a yearly fundraiser.
Collins was friends with Nash, Stephen Stills and the David Crosby from the era of their debut album in 1969, which was distinguished with the Stephen Stills-penned three-part tune, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
