Some combination of her eyes and voice once prompted Richard Farina, the poet, songwriter and hellraiser who was her great friend, to write about her with the words “If amethysts could sing. She has eyes so blue that her one-time lover, Stephen Stills, once put them in a song title. The problem with that idea is apparent both on the cover and in the title of Collins’s lilting new memoir of a great musical career, five decades old and still going strong: Collins has the most transfixing, otherworldly blue high-beams ever seen above an acoustic guitar. “We can call you the Brown-Eyed Girls,” he said.

She would sing with two other women, Judy Henske and Jo Mapes. The 70-minute set covered the story of her career: from hearing her dad sing Irish folk songs to becoming a classically trained pianist, a New York folkie, a Beatles fan, meeting Leonard Cohen and writing her own music.Albert Grossman, who had put together Peter, Paul and Mary as a folksinging trio, once suggested to Judy Collins that she become part of a trio, too. Thereafter, Collins' vocals were more consistent and, at times, magical. Moreover, the illness apparently affected her voice as her pitch often wavered in her upper register.įinally, after hacking away several times, acoustic-guitarist Collins dispatched her pianist, Russell Walden, to the dressing room for some cough medicine. Not only did she have a handful of jokes prepared ('We used to call it the Great American Songbook now we call it the Rod Stewart Songbook') but a disruptive cough forced her to be even more informal and talkative. 'You all know the '60s are on their way back it's new and improved,' Collins told a packed house.

She is getting ready to take her club act to New York's tony Cafe Carlyle for a six-week run starting April 21, and she was loose, familiar and political. After breaking into 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone,' she asked: 'I just wondered if Sarah Palin knew that song.'Ĭollins, 69, let her hair down - her voluminous silver mane cascading to the middle of her back - compared to her previous more formal performances in Twin Cities theaters and concert halls.

Like Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins started out as a folk singer in the 1960s and became so much more: activist, muse (Crosby, Stills & Nash's 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes'), mother, hitmaker, chanteuse, author, suicide-prevention crusader, icon.Īfter her first of two nights at the Dakota Jazz Club on Monday, add comedian to that list.Ĭollins was firing off Mae West's jokes, one-liners that Dolly Parton had uttered in an interview with Larry King and her own political jabs.

Sweet judy blue eyes my life in music