She may no longer be the “ruby throated sparrow” immortalized by Stephen Stills more than a half century ago.
But at 82, Judy Collins still can captivate an audience.
With grace and humor and style, Collins took fans on a 90-minute musical journey Sunday at Morristown’s Mayo Performing Arts Center, winding from her youth as a piano prodigy in Denver and Greenwich Village folk queen to Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, Carnegie Hall interpreter of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Cohen, and songwriter.
She has more than 50 albums to her credit. Yet incredibly, she has waited until now to produce one consisting entirely of her own compositions. She’s also taken up podcasting, with a series called Since You’ve Asked.
It took her a song or two– Mountain Girl and, appropriately, Diamonds and Rust–to dial in her voice on Sunday. Clearly, she has taken good care of this magnificent instrument since closing the book on the excesses of her younger days.
(Every time you take a cigarette into your body, she said, quoting a pandemic admonition from a friend’s doctor, “God takes an hour of your life and gives it to Keith Richards.”)
By the time Collins reached her encore, Amazing Grace, she sounded amazing, and so did the audience, which filled in a hard-to-remember verse, on key and with love.
In recent years Collins has shared stages with Stills, Don McClean and Arlo Guthrie. This time, her 12-string guitar, pianist Russell Walden, and the crowd were all the accompaniment she needed.
With a laugh, she remembered the “Great Folk Scare’ that compelled her in 1959 to trade Mozart concertos for ballads by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
“Nobody knew you could make a living at it, that’s for sure. It’s still in question.”
She demonstrated the power of the genre throughout the evening, with songs such as Woody Guthrie’s Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) and Bob Dylan’s Masters of War; both, sadly, remain timely, decades after they were written.
Collins’ first impressions of Dylan drew roars of laughter at MPAC. When he was still Robert Zimmerman, she recounted, “he was homeless, he was trying to get a job singing, his repertoire consisted of old Woody Guthrie blues, badly chosen, badly sung.”
Over drinks with him at a club, “I would laugh to myself thinking, ‘He’s going nowhere.'”
Awhile, later, Collins was reading Sing Out magazine on a plane and was astonished by the lyrics to Blowin’ in the Wind. When she saw his name (recently changed to Bob Dylan) at the bottom, “I thought there must be some mistake.”
After a false start Sunday on Masters of War, Collins quipped: “Bob’s revenge!”
Her set list included Helplessly Hoping — the other song Stephen Stills penned about their long-ago affair, by her account — and Joni Mitchell’s River and Both Sides Now. Missing was Collins’ signature song, Sondheim’s Send In the Clowns.
Some of the concert’s most hypnotic moments came when Collins settled behind the piano for a series of swirling, haunting new songs from her upcoming collection of originals.
One is called Grand Canyon. Another, So Alive, reflects on her heady days as a rising star in the Village. Another speculates about the shadowy death of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, author of the 1948 bestseller The Seven Storey Mountain.
A wig has replaced her flowing locks, lost after surgery a few years back. But Judy Collins has no shortage of stories to tell in this third act of her storied career. And she has more than enough voice to deliver them.
“Thank you so much,” she said after a song, near the close of Sunday’s show.
From opposite sides of the Mayo Performing Arts Center, a man and a woman answered: “Thank you.“
