On a rainswept Monday, “Miss American Idol 1956”, as Judy Collins likes to introduce herself these days, drew a near-capacity crowd to the Union Chapel, Islington, for an intimate concert that felt at times as if it were in a large living room. She’s 86 now, wearing a pixie cut instead of her once-signature rock-star mane, but the eyes that so entranced Stephen Stills are no less blue and she’s still doing what’s she done so gloriously for some sixty-five years. It was, she reflected, 1965 when she made her British debut, with Tom Paxton, and she’s been a regular visitor ever since.
In the Seventies (I first saw her at the Albert Hall in 1972) she toured with a band but for a couple of decades now she’s worked solely with pianist and musical director Russell Walden, a gentle consort who adds harmony vocals and the occasional missing date or name as Collins recounts anecdotes from her storied career: Bobby Zimmerman sitting at her feet in in Denver clubs in 1959. John Deutschendorf, a support act in the mid-Sixties, joining the Collins family on their Colorado vacation and renaming himself John Denver a few days after his return. Working with Josh White, friend of the Roosevelts, who put “House of the Rising Sun” on the map. Waking up from a drunken sleep at an Albert Grossman house party in Woodstock to hear Bob Dylan working on a new song that the world would shortly know as “Mr Tambourine Man”. And of course, meeting Leonard Cohen who appeared at her New York City front door one day with some poems he thought might be songs. “I took one look at him and thought: Well, we’ll think of something!”
Along with Joan Baez, who quit touring in 2018, and Canadian singer-songwriter Bonnie Dobson, long resident in London and still singing, Judy Collins was there at the start, participant in and witness to what Dave van Ronk called “the great folk scare”, when music gave voice to our grievances and our grieving, powering a movement that helped bring about real change on which we all thought the clock would never be turned back. Until it was.
For a couple of hours, Collins took her audience back to a kinder, gentler, more hopeful time, plucking numbers from her own vast songbag and quite a few leaves from the Great American Songbook with which she grew up, her blind father a singer and radio host. There was also a dusting of seasonal fayre: “White Christmas”, “Silver Bells” and “The Cherry Tree Carol”, one of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads catalogued by Harvard Shakespeare scholar and orator Francis James Child. She opened with “Both Sides Now”, which put another unknown named Joni Mitchell on the map, and followed it up with “Diamonds and Rust”, Baez’s celebrated reflection on her affair with Dylan. From her earliest days came “John Riley”, a rare folk song with a happy ending.
From recent decades she plucked “Spellbound”, and “Colorado (The Blizzard)”, a magnificent through-composed song of snatched love amid a mountain white-out which Collins performs at the piano, revealing the concert pianist her parents and teacher hoped she’d be. No rudimentary block chords and pumping the keys – instead, beautiful passage-work and delicate figurations which perfectly conjure up the snowflakes and icicles of which she sings. And there was Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns”, a top ten Grammy-nominated hit from 1975. She still sings it beautifully and there is a real poignancy to it now, Collins in her ninth decade reflecting on the ironies of her long and rich life.
The evening, at once both concert and history lesson, ended – of course – with “Amazing Grace”, Collins prefacing it with a brief history of the song’s origins, written by reformed slave trader John Newton of Olney, Buckinghamshire. At a time when there is no balm in Gilead, a hymn which Collins took into the charts in 1970 and made into an anthem, “Amazing Grace” was the perfect way to close the evening.
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