Judy Collins: Sweet Judy Blue Eyes Forever

Judy Collins, whose latest CD is “Judy Collins Sings Lennon & McCartney,” was never a rocker. In fact, she’s always been difficult to categorize. A folk singer when she first gained recognition in the early Sixties, she’s had only four records in the Top 40 in a career spanning some 45 years: “Both Sides Now,” “Amazing Grace,” “Cook With Honey,” and “Send in the Clowns.”

There you go. A folkie number written by Joni Mitchell. A hymn. I don’t remember “Cook With Honey,” but it probably sounds like its title, a feel-good song that’d fit “light rock” stations, if any of today’s programmers remembered it. And a Stephen Sondheim composition for a Broadway musical (“A Little Night Music”).  

Collins is an album artist. That larger palette gives her a chance to tackle a range of song styles and tempos. In her earlier years, she had great success applying her sweet and sure soprano to works by Leonard Cohen, and “Suzanne” became a staple on the free-form FM rock stations of the late Sixties.

That soprano is as steady as ever, and Judy, now 68, is as good-humored as ever, switching “When I’m 64” to “when I’m 84” at one point, and adding a little scatting to “Norwegian Wood.”

So, why an entire album devoted to John and Paul’s works? She’d done Cohen and Bob Dylan before, she told me. “I find focusing on a particular writer for a period of time to be fun and healing and education. And it just gives me a lot of pleasure.”

When I phoned Judy, who lives in New York, she was wrapping up another call, and saying, repeatedly, “I love you.” It turned out to be Stephen Stills, one of the big romances in her life and perhaps her strongest connection to rock. She, after all, was the subject of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” In fact, she says, the newly unearthed CD of a dozen tunes Stills laid down, accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar, in a studio one night in 1968, includes a short, sweet song called “Judy.”  You could feel the warmth in her voice as she spoke about the song, and about the album (‘Just Roll Tape”). True love never dies.

Click here to listen to Judy Collins explain why she included the Beatles’ “Blackbird” in her album.