Judy Collins Speaks: Of 'Rainbow', 'Clowns' and All Sides Now

Second in a three-part series for Women’s History Month spotlighting acclaimed female performers who have also excelled in other fields.

Among Judy Collins’ many accomplishments, she is responsible for the last showtune to win the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. That, of course, was her 1975 rendition of “Send in the Clowns,” which helped establish the Stephen Sondheim song as a standard and made it a pop hit. A folk-music icon, Collins has included showtunes and standards, as well as rock songs, lullabies and hymns, Christmas carols and her own compositions, on the 40-plus albums she’s released since her debut, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, in 1961.

Her latest recording is of an all-time classic, “Over the Rainbow,” written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg for The Wizard of Oz. Collins sings “Over the Rainbow” on a CD that’s included with a beautiful new coffeetable-book-like picture book, Over the Rainbow, featuring the lyrics as text and illustrations by French artist Eric Puybaret. Collins has another CD set for release in May: her latest album, Paradise. That month she will also begin an extended engagement at the Café Carlyle in New York City. This is her fifth straight year performing at the Carlyle, and she’ll be there May 4 to June 12.

Over the Rainbow is one in a series of children’s books illustrating famous songs, each accompanied by a CD of the song (Collins also sings “White Choral Bells” and “I See the Moon” on the book’s CD). The imprint was spearheaded by Collins’ fellow folksinger/humanitarian Peter Yarrow and is published by Imagine Publishing. Collins herself is the author of more than half a dozen books, including three—Sanity & Grace: A Journey of Suicide, Survival, and Strength; The Seven T’s: Finding Hope and Healing in the Wake of Tragedy; and Singing Lessons: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Hope, and Healing—that detail her recovery from the death of her only child, son Clark, who killed himself in 1992 at age 33.

Collins, 70, is also well known for her work as a social activist. She’s participated in numerous events and campaigns for human rights, peace and justice; she testified for the defense at the Chicago Seven trial; and she serves as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. In addition, Judy Collins is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker. Her movie Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman—about Antonia Brico, the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic—was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar in 1975 and, more recently, was added to the Library of Congress film registry. Collins studied piano with Brico as a child, after her family moved to Denver from Seattle.

Born in Seattle, Collins has lived in Manhattan since the early ’60s and has been married since 1996 to her second husband, creative designer Louis Nelson. I spoke with the singer earlier this week by phone from California, as she was en route from San Juan Capistrano—where she’d performed the night before—to San Diego, where she had a concert that evening. Collins had also spent time over the weekend with her 22-year-old granddaughter, who goes to school in California. In our interview, she talks about singing, writing and advocating for yourself and others.

Has “Over the Rainbow” ever been part of your repertoire?
No, I never sang it. I recorded “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” for my 1974 album Judith, and after I did that, I got to know Yip Harburg, and he was always pushing that song to me...“Why don’t you sing it?” But I thought: No, it’s too associated with Judy Garland. I sang “When You Wish Upon a Star” a couple of times in concert, but “Over the Rainbow” is a brand-new experience for me. It’s not an easy song, by the way, to get into your voice and to be comfortable with. But the minute I got the request to do this children’s book from Peter Yarrow, I said: That’s absolutely perfect. He wanted young people to get to know a great song. It’s perfect for me, it’s a wonderful thing to do, and I had just seen Wicked for the first time and I thought, Ah! This couldn’t be better.

Is it true you were named after Judy Garland?
My mother told me that I was named after Judy Garland, yes. Well, you know, it was the time: The movie came out the year I was born. The song was on the radio in September, and I was born in May. My father was in show business, so it makes a lot of sense.

You dedicated the book to your parents. How did they influence your career?
There was so much music. My dad was in the radio business—he had a radio show for 30 years—so I grew up in and around a radio station. And then I got to go and see performers, and they were always part of our life, people that sang and played and performed. That was very much the context of our life. I had all that influence of the popular songs of the era, sung by my father. And when I started playing folk music, I realized he had been singing a lot of old Irish songs in and amongst the George Gershwin.

Did they also influence your social conscience?
Oh, yes, very much. They were great believers in the New Deal and in doing service and giving back and supporting causes that you believe in. They were true blue Democrats—my father would be cheering from his grave today with the health-care plan. I guess it’s about a hundred years in coming, isn’t it?

I heard Pete Seeger sing “Over the Rainbow” at a demonstration against the Iraq war in 2003. Do you consider it a protest song?
I feel that anything that’s about life and hope and ideas of a better world is a song that has value in our lives and could be considered a protest against the awful things that are happening in the world. I don’t only sing protest songs; I sing songs about all conditions of life. Politics is made up, contrary to what the Republicans think, of all conditions of life that we feel and can express—and have, of course, the right and the responsibility to express. That’s why we have freedom of speech here. I suppose in a way it explains why everyone’s favorite song, around the world, is “Over the Rainbow.” It is a protest against ugliness, and the autocrats and the nasty people who run the show much of the time. 

You mentioned seeing Wicked. Do you go to the theater often?
I do, when I can. I try to keep up with what’s going on in the theater.

How about some reviews?
Of course I loved Jersey Boys. Everybody loves Jersey Boys. I thought this remake of South Pacific was extremely good. I even sang in South Pacific when I was a kid—we did a production in a park in Denver. Always loved the show; always had the cast album. The redo of Guys and Dolls was wonderful to see—wonderful, wonderful songs, just some of the best scores in the world. I know all these songs because I was raised with them: I heard them on the radio, and I heard my father sing them. “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” I’ve known since I could breathe, I think. I recorded it on an album called Classic Broadway. I sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” on that album. I loved the song, so I got the chance to sing it.

Did you discover “Send in the Clowns” on your own, or did someone suggest it to you?
The play had been out for a couple of years, and the [cast] record had been made, and a friend of mine called me and said, “You should really hear this song.” She sent me the record, and I put the needle on the cut and I played it, and I thought, “Oh, my God! That’s for me.” Then I called Hal Prince and said, “You have a great song here in your show,” and he said, “Yes, I know that. About 200 people have already recorded it.” And I said, “I don’t care.” He said, “Frank Sinatra’s recorded it.” And I said, “I don’t care. I have to sing it!” And I called Jonathan Tunick and he did the orchestration, and the rest is history.

Have you seen the current Broadway revival of A Little Night Music?
No, but I’m going to soon.

Do you feel at all possessive of that song?
I don’t have to feel possessive about it. I recorded it, and it became a huge hit, so I don’t really have to claim it so much as just do it. I know Stephen Sondheim well, he’s a wonderful man. I’ve recorded other of his songs: “Pretty Women” and “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” and “I Remember Sky,” which is one of my favorite songs of his early...I think it was from Evening Primrose.

Have you thought about being in a show on Broadway, or off?
I was in Central Park, in the Delacorte, doing Peer Gynt in 1969 with Stacy Keach. I played Solveig. I was in The Exonerated a few years ago. I played the Sunny Jacobs part. That was extremely interesting and very moving to do that part. Bob Balaban [who produced it] had called me to be in that production, and it was amazing.
I have had a couple of offers—things I wasn’t really right for. I did a reading for Nine once. People do sometimes think of me, but I will never do eight shows a week. I might if it was one song, but I couldn’t do a standard eight shows a week on Broadway, because it’s too much, I can’t afford to risk the voice. Five nights is wonderful, and I quite often do that. I do about a hundred shows a year, maybe more—110, I think, last year. So that is fine: one out of three days [laughs], but anything more I would not be comfortable. I’d be afraid I would strain myself.

What’s on your new album?
“Over the Rainbow” is on it—a slightly different version [than the book]; there’s an orchestration on the end of it. “Diamonds and Rust,” a song of Joan Baez’s, with her singing a duet with me. “Last Thing on My Mind,” which is an old Tom Paxton song, that’s a duet with Stephen Stills. A brand-new song of Jimmy Webb’s called “Gauguin,” about the painter. The song of mine which is called “Kingdom Come” that’s about the 9/11 attacks. It’s dedicated to the firefighters. What else is on this album? “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” one of my favorite songs in the world, with a chorus of the greatest guy singers: Tom Paxton and Jimmy Webb; Bob Neuwirth, who used to be Bob Dylan’s road manager; my brother Denver. It’s really great. Whenever we sing a little of it in the concerts, people go nuts, because they love singing that chorus: you know, “yippee-yi-oh!”

Had you ever sung with Joan Baez before?
Before this record, I had done two duets. One was with T.G. Sheppard in 1984 [“Home Again”], and one was with Joan Baez and her sister Mimi—a trio—in 1967 for a CD that I was producing to raise money for Women Strike for Peace. They were a very, very important antiwar women’s group; they got a lot of legislation done, they helped with the nuclear test ban treaty... On that album, it was all women: Buffy Sainte-Marie sang a song, and I did a trio with Joan and her sister Mimi, a song of Pete Seeger’s called “Golden Thread.” I don’t know if it’s available—I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on YouTube. But people talk about it; people remember it somehow. Maybe they have the record.

Is “Kingdom Come,” the 9/11 song, something you’ve been working on since 2001?
I wrote it in the year following the attacks. I sing it in concerts quite frequently. I never really recorded it properly. It’s a very important song, not only for its content—the reasons it was written—but also it’s kind of an anthem. I think, quite frankly, it’s one of my best songs, and I wanted to do it justice and get it out in a way that made it sound the way it should.
Just a sidebar here: The day that I open at the Carlyle, May 4, is called Firefighters’ Day. I know this because my friend Jim McGrath, who is a retired captain in the Fire Department, when we were talking about it [her Carlyle engagement]—he’s going to come to the opening night—and he said, “That is the day.” So I’m going to sing it that night to make an acknowledgment of how important these people are who put our safety before theirs. I’m so glad he and I were talking about it, because it’s not something I would have known. Although I live uptown, and the firefighters have a memorial up there—on 100th Street and Riverside Drive—and every year they all bring the bagpipes and there are hundreds and hundreds of uniformed firefighters who gather. I’ll hear the bagpipes coming in through the windows, and I’ve been down there a couple of times during celebrations to speak or to be a part of it, but I forgot which day it is.

Is Café Carlyle different from the types of venues where you usually perform?
I play everything from, occasionally, a stadium—if I’m in a big folk festival—everything from that to Carnegie Hall to small clubs to private events... There were a couple of great clubs in the Village that I worked in a lot, the Bitter End and Gertie’s Folk City. The Bottom Line, I worked in a little bit, not a lot. So this is really only the third club that I’ve worked in on any regular basis. I do what I do; it’s not what people would call cabaret. It’s Judy Collins’ show, really. I love the Carlyle because it is so intimate and everybody’s so delighted to be there. It has an atmosphere, a kind of a resonance of all these wonderful artists who’ve been there. So there’s great appreciation for the story-song and for the storytelling, and that is, I think, the strength that’s come through in the last 15 or 20 years in terms of my own performing. I tell a lot more stories than I ever did, and people love it because they love the history and they love the connections with the songs, people I’ve known and the things that have happened in my life. That makes it, I think, even more intimate than it might otherwise be. So it’s not just a string of songs, it’s an experience that hopefully takes you into another place and is musically satisfying as well as in a literary sense satisfying.

Regarding the issues you have advocated for, do you feel more pleased or disappointed at what has occurred over the years?
Advocacy is always a disappointing enterprise, ’cause you’re never going to get everything you want. You learn very early on in your life, if you’re going to be a performer, not to count on things until they’ve happened. Therefore, your disappointment level goes down as the years go by. Or perhaps your expectations go down—perhaps that’s the more truthful way to put it. I’m thrilled that I’ve had the career that I’ve had, and it’s going better than ever. I think that’s kind of remarkable, in what I know about careers.

What about women’s rights specifically—what do you consider the great advancements and great disappointments for women in your lifetime?
Well, probably, equal pay for equal work has a long way to go. I heard some interesting statistics in the health-care debate—that one thing that will not happen is that women will be singled out to have to pay more for health care. They will not be penalized for being female. All these seemingly small areas, little windows of improvement. There still aren’t many women in the richest people in the world, but there will be. Look, Kathryn Bigelow winning the Academy Award for The Hurt Locker was a very important step. And I think the general rising of women in terms of their abilities to go anywhere, do anything, be in any kind of industry has been phenomenal. My film about Antonia Brico told the story of this extraordinary woman who was breaking down the barriers of the conducting world.
I’m a great supporter of women’s choice, and I think it’s disgusting that there are so many limits and so little understanding about choice. Thank God for Nancy Pelosi, who understands, even though she is a Catholic, that this is an issue of choice for women. What they’re going to do with their bodies should not be dictated by their insurance companies or their governments. We did get Roe v. Wade, and it’s kept us, I think, from some of the worst possibilities that might have been. And it has not been overturned—at least not legally. It’s been eaten away in some areas, but it’s still there. So that’s a bit of a triumph that we shouldn’t overlook, even though it seems as though some things have been lost. Still, a lot of progress has been made in the areas of women’s health, the understanding that women have the right to choose the way they want to live—whether they want to make a living, whether they want to raise a family, whether they want to devote their lives to service of one kind or another. And, you know, we’ve had a woman pretty close to the presidency. A couple of times. It may happen before we know it.

What encourages, and discourages, you about the current sociopolitical situation in our country?
It’s kind of a free-for-all out there. The Tea Party people might think about getting a life. But that’s the price you pay for living in a democracy; you cannot say, “Freedom of speech—except you and you and you.” The news-cycle focus on argumentative politics, I just turn it off, because I don’t want to engage in it. But the alternative to chaos is to have a monarch. We don’t live in a monarchy, so we have to deal with the chaos the best we can.
I do think it’s a positive development over the years that people are not interested in keeping secrets anymore. Except for the great conspiracies that go on that we can’t seem to do anything about—the conspiracy of the insurance companies to bleed us all blind, for instance. Money has a great deal to do with that, and greed and power—it seems to have swept the country up in a habitual, nonstop “I want, I want, I want” and “More and more and more is better.” I don’t happen to agree with that philosophy. But, on the other hand, I think people are, generally speaking, more engaged in much of what’s going on in their lives for the better. People have much more become their own advocates. That’s something I have been very much about in my work, in my writing. I’ve written a lot about suicide and survival, because I lost a son to suicide. To me, that was a social taboo that I hope has changed. When he died, there was nothing written about it particularly; now the bookshelves are filled with people’s ideas about it. I do some speaking for mental health organizations and suicide prevention and/or recovery organizations. The organization that I’m more affiliated with was begun by Ed Shneidman, who was the foremost educator and spokesperson and writer about suicide in this country. He’s the first person who started a suicide hotline, in 1949 in Los Angeles, when it was very taboo. In fact, they told him he should take the word “suicide” out of it—it was not something that could be spoken aloud in public. It’s like cancer being once upon a time very much a secret, and now it’s spoken of openly. The same thing about alcoholism. I think Betty Ford did [so much] for alcoholics and addiction because she spoke out. In that regard, people’s rights of free speech and education, and becoming their own advocates, is a very big, big area of growth and exciting change. Because I was a ’50s girl—you didn’t talk about nothin’! Everything was a big secret. 

What message do you share with people about recovering from a devastating loss, such as the suicide of a loved one?
You have to get down to basics like grieving, and eating and sleeping and having a social life. As far as I’m concerned, doing that is a very political statement. To go into the world and say, “I deserve to have a happy, joyous and free life, and I’m not going to let these dark shadows destroy me.” It’s very political—personal politics involved... It’s like putting the oxygen on yourself before you try to help the other people in the plane. You have to find a way to go through the grief and to come out the other side. It doesn’t matter that it will happen again—of course, it happens all the time—but you have to educate yourself and develop your survival skills. Every person in the world has to find a way to survive the planet, because it’s not easy. 

What else is coming up besides your album release and Café Carlyle shows?
I have a lot of upcoming events, including hospital visits. We went to the Children’s Hospital in Denver to do a presentation and took them about 25 books. I was in that Children’s Hospital myself when I was 10, with polio, so I have a connection with the hospital and am happy to support them.
We’re doing Glastonbury in England in June, and then I’m going to France for a concert. I’m doing a big AARP concert in October with Crosby, Stills and Nash and Richie Havens...their big yearly convention, in Orlando, and we’re the—whatever you call it—the “keynote singers.“
My book that’s coming out in 2011 is coming along very well. It’s called Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. It’s a memoir. The subtitle is Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll and the Music That Changed a Civilization.

So music and art can change a civilization?
Oh, absolutely.

Bottom three photos taken during Judy Collins’ engagement at Café Carlyle last spring: singing; with Erica Jong and Bernadette Peters; with Hillary Clinton. Photos by Brad Barket/Getty Images.

Click here for the first interview in this Women’s History Month series, with actor/director Judith Ivey.