Judy Collins

Collins' debut studio album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, was released in 1961 and consisted of traditional folk songs. She had her first charting single with "Hard Lovin' Loser" (No. 97) from her fifth studio album In My Life (1966), but it was the lead single from her sixth studio album Wildflowers (1967), "Both Sides, Now" – written by Joni Mitchell – that gave her international prominence. The single reached No. 8 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart^[2] and won Collins her first Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance.^[3] She enjoyed further success with her recordings of "Someday Soon", "Chelsea Morning" (also written by Mitchell), "Amazing Grace", "Turn! Turn! Turn!", and "Cook with Honey".


Collins experienced the biggest success of her career with her recording of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" from her tenth studio album Judith (1975). The single peaked at No. 36 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart in 1975 and then again in 1977 at No. 19, spending 27 non-consecutive weeks on the chart and earning her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, as well as a Grammy Award for Sondheim for Song of the Year.^[4] Judith would also become her best-selling studio album; it was certified Gold by the RIAA in 1975 for sales of over 500,000 copies and Platinum in 1996 for sales of over 1,000,000 copies.^[5]


In 2017, Collins's rendition of the song "Amazing Grace" was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant".^[6] That same year, she received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Folk Album for Silver Skies Blue with Ari Hest.^[7] In 2019 at the age of 80, she scored her first No. 1 album on an American Billboard Chart with Winter Stories, a duet album with Norwegian singer, songwriter, and guitarist Jonas Fjeld featuring Chatham County Line.^[8] In 2022, she released her first studio album of all original material, titled Spellbound, and it earned her another Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album.

Early life[edit]

Collins was born the eldest of five siblings in Seattle, Washington, where she spent the first ten years of her life. Her father (a blind singer, pianist, and radio show host) took a job in Denver, Colorado in 1949 and the family moved there. Her grandfather was Irish.^[9][10]


Collins contracted polio at the age of 11 and spent two months in isolation in a hospital.^[11]

Activism[edit]

Like many other folk singers of her generation, Collins was drawn to social activism. Her political idealism also led her to compose a ballad entitled "Che" in honor of the 1960s Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.^[52]


Collins sympathized with the Yippie movement and was friendly with its leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. On March 17, 1968, she attended Hoffman's press conference at the Americana Hotel in New York to announce the party's formation. In 1969, she testified in Chicago in support of the Chicago Seven; during her testimony, she began singing Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and was admonished by prosecutor Tom Foran and judge Julius Hoffman.^[53]


In 1971, Collins signed her name to a Ms. campaign, "We Have Had Abortions", which called for an end to "archaic laws" regarding abortion rights; the campaign encouraged women to share their stories and take action. In 1982, she wrote the song "Mama Mama" about a mother of five and her ambivalence over her decision to abort an unintended pregnancy.^{[54][55][56][57]}


In the late 1990s, she was a representative for UNICEF^[58] and campaigns on behalf of the abolition of landmines.^[59]


Later songs include "River of Gold" about the environment and "My Name is Maria" about dreamers.^[60]

Personal life[edit]

Collins has been married twice. Her first marriage to Peter Taylor in 1958 produced her only child, Clark C. Taylor, born the same year. The marriage ended in divorce in 1965.^[61] In April 1996, she married industrial designer Louis Nelson, whom she had been seeing since April 1978. They live in New York City.^[62]


In 1962, shortly after her debut at Carnegie Hall, Collins was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent six months recuperating in a sanatorium.^[63]


Collins is the subject of the Stephen Stills composition "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", which appeared on the 1969 eponymous debut studio album of Crosby, Stills & Nash.^[64]


Collins suffered from bulimia nervosa after she quit smoking in the 1970s. "I went straight from the cigarettes into an eating disorder", she told People magazine in 1992. "I started throwing up. I didn't know anything about bulimia, certainly not that it is an addiction or that it would get worse. My feelings about myself, even though I had been able to give up smoking and lose 20 pounds, were of increasing despair." She has written at length of her years of addiction to alcohol, the damage it did to her personal and musical life and how it contributed to her feelings of depression.^[65] She admits that although she tried other drugs in the 1960s, alcohol had always been her drug of first choice just as it had been for her father. She entered a rehabilitation program in Pennsylvania in 1978 and has maintained her sobriety ever since, even through such traumatic events as the death of her only child, Clark, by suicide in 1992 at age 33 after a long bout with clinical depression and substance abuse. Since then, she has also become an activist for suicide prevention.^[66]