Judy Collins at 85

Judy Collins turns 85 today, May 1st.

I saw her in concert ten days before this birthday at Symphony Space in Manhattan, just blocks from where she has long lived on the Upper West Side. And her guitar playing, piano playing, her singing were all—as before, as expected—lovely.

That voice was and remains extraordinary, as luminous, as unmuddied, as comfortable at high elevations, as any in folk or rock music. Judy Collins wrote some good songs, but she discovered and sang, always wonderfully, some of the most important songs of the second half of the twentieth century. She is a woman of impressive talent but also extraordinary taste.

I started listening to Judy Collins records in high school, often with my friend Richard Cohart on his parents’ high-quality stereo. (Sad memory for me: Richard, who became a photographer and was active in the struggle against AIDS, died early in this century in San Francisco.)

It was on those records that we first heard Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and Leonard Cohen’s "Bird on a Wire," both of which Judy Collins recorded before their authors did.

Indeed, the first time Richard and I—and just about everybody else—heard Leonard Cohen’s ethereal “Suzanne” was on an earlier Collins record. That was also the first time we and just about everybody else, outside of Canadian poetry afficionados, heard of Leonard Cohen.

Collins also helped start the new vogue for an old hymn: “Amazing Grace”; “Once I was lost and now I’m found, was blind but now I see.” She closed the show with it at Symphony Space.

Between songs Collins told stories. Some were about her father, a singer, pianist and radio host. I don’t believe she mentioned that night that he had been blind. A song she wrote, “My Father,” does include a line about “the sun setting in my father’s eyes.”

       Some of the stories Collins told us that evening were about her own career: As a teenager, she explained, folk music seduced her away from classical piano. And some recounted what proved to be significant moments in the history of the music of our time.

Collins told of staying overnight at Albert Grossman’s house in upstate New York, where she had gone for a party, when in the hallway outside her room she heard Bob Dylan and his guitar—as he struggled to get “Mr. Tambourine Man” right. Her recording of this, probably the ultimate drug song, came out five months after Dylan’s in 1965.

She also recalled, at Symphony Space, her first meeting with Leonard Cohen, whom a friend had introduced to her as a poet who wrote “obscure” poems and now “obscure” songs. Cohen informed her that he could not sing and could not play guitar, and then proceeded to play and sing “Suzanne” for her.

I wasn’t much of a theater buff, but Judy Collins also had introduced me and my friend Richard to Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” a song that makes it hard to imagine that there could be a better song. Others of the songs mentioned above can similarly stymie the imagination. It is also hard to imagine that anyone could sing “Send in the Clowns,” or some of those other songs, better than Judy Collins.

Collins’ age only became apparent during the concert when she forgot a name or a word and had to ask her accomplished accompanists, Robbie Kondor on piano and Thad DeBock on guitar, to fill in the blank.

In fact, she had a minor senior moment when singing, “Isn't it rich? Isn’t it queer? Losing my . . .” (she had to pause for beat or two) “timing . . . my timing this late in my career.”

It is indeed late in Judy Collins’s career. But her mastery remains intact.