Judy Collins

by Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music

  From my diary of March 28, 1964:

  If, however, I am not as enthusiastic about Hootenanny as I was about two weeks ago, it is because Pete Seeger and the Weavers have been blacklisted from the show. The blacklist is not only in working condition in this country, as it has been for decades … there have already been meetings after meetings, with everyone from the Kingston Trio to John Phillips.

  Pete had already been excluded, as though by a secret agreement, by all the other networks, including ABC, though Harold had been fighting that fight for years.

  The rumble among the troops gained force until it became an angry roar in the wider folk community. While the ABC folk music show would finally bring our music to a wider audience, the blacklist represented a blow not just to Seeger but also to the many singer-songwriters trying to make a living at what they did best.

  By now there were anti-ABC protests developing outside concerts, and Harold Leventhal, Jac Holzman, and Pete Seeger called a meeting at Harold’s office to discuss the boycott of the boycott. Harold had, of course, managed Pete since the early Weavers days. He had stood by Seeger in every confrontation Pete had faced with HUAC. He knew what they were up against.

  “The fate of many artists as well as the health of the growing folk movement has to be considered,” Harold said. He represented not only Pete but also many other singers who, like myself, were going to be involved in some way in these decisions about appearing on Hootenanny. “If we boycott the show, the entire folk movement may be at stake.”

  Then Pete Seeger stood up to speak, and told those of us gathered that afternoon that not doing the show would hurt the entire folk movement. Pete said the same thing to everyone who was torn about appearing on Hootenanny. Pete was always for the singer and the song.

  “Doing the show will be good for the music, like nothing else,” he said.

  The Tarriers, in which my friends Eric Weissberg, Marshall Brickman, and Clarence Cooper played, had appeared on Hootenanny in its first season, but in the second season, they were at first booked and then, following the blacklist of Pete, were canceled. The following week, in a surprise move, ABC reversed its position and asked the Tarriers to appear. However, there was a catch: the only time slot the producers said they had open was on the following Saturday, only three days away, and the Tarriers had a gig booked for that night at the Village Gate in New York. Harold called Pete.

  “Pete, Pete, I hate to ask you this, but …” He filled Pete in on what had happened.

  “Of course!” Pete said. And so, while the Tarriers were on the show that he was blacklisted from, Pete Seeger filled in for them at the Village Gate.

  Weintraub continued to fight to get Pete on the program, but ABC would not relent. Seeger, arguably the most important folk artist of the era, never appeared on this pioneering show.

  “Pete saved my life,” Fred said. “He insisted everyone go on Hootenanny. He knew the show would bring the whole world to folk music, as I had known it would.”

  We spoke of the critical piece Nat Hentoff had written about the “great Hoot scare.” “Nat was a total bastard to me,” Fred said. “He called me names.” I said he had done the same to me.

  “But Pete knew the truth,” Fred continued. “Sometimes the good is the enemy of the best, and Pete gave us the best answer. He said, ‘Do the goddammed show—it will be good for everyone!’ ”

  The result was that many protest songs were aired; many groups, both traditional and commercial, had been seen by millions, and the Tarriers had finally broken the racial barrier on TV twice.

  Hootenanny was shot at a different college campus each week. From March of 1963 through the following year, hundreds of performers graced college campuses around the country and subsequently appeared on television in Hootenanny: Bill Monroe, the Serendipity Singers, the New Christy Minstrels, Eddy Arnold, Pete Fountain, Doc Watson, and the Simon Sisters (Lucy and Carly). Jim (Roger) McGuinn, Theo Bikel, the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Journeymen with John Phillips, and the Big Three with Mama Cass Elliot were on the show, as was David Crosby, who sang with the Modern Folk Quartet. (This appearance preceded his joining the Byrds, which McGuinn would form with Crosby in 1965.) The Limelighters also appeared on Hootenanny, as did the Clancy Brothers, Tommy Makem, and Oscar Brand. Glenn Campbell was the staff bass player. I first did the show from Brown University in Providence in May 1963.

  By the end of its second season, Hootenanny had started making artistic decisions that were not in keeping with any artist’s intention: verses were cut from songs, and performances were squeezed into rigid time slots. The show ended in September 1964. Unfortunately, Hootenanny is largely lost to history, since most of the tapes of the show were wiped clean long before they could have been transformed into digital boxed sets.

  Pete Seeger’s position during this time allowed the people and the music he loved to flourish. He had the courage, as he has had all his life, to defy the mob.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mississippi Summer

  It isn’t right to block the doorway

  It isn’t nice to go to jail.

  —MALVINA REYNOLDS, “It Isn’t Nice”

  NINETEEN sixty-four was awash with cultural and political events that would shake up the country. The journalist David Halberstam was openly criticizing the war in the New York Times, writing about the lies we were being told, helping to lift the veil of the 1950s, when we automatically believed that those in power told the truth. The country was still swaying with grief over Kennedy’s assassination; Lyndon Johnson, who had taken the oath of the presidency on Air Force One on November 22, 1963, after JFK was declared dead, was voted into office a year later by a 61 percent majority. The war in Vietnam was growing more intense. There was hope that Johnson would pull back our involvement in Indochina, but now it was becoming apparent that he took the party line on Vietnam.

  Young men who were in danger of being drafted were heading north to Canada or finding ways to be exempted. For the first time, mental illness and acute anxiety were being considered as reasons to be rejected by the draft board. Kids, really, were looking closely at their draft numbers—were they high or low?—and deciding, with a new maturity, they were against war. And being against the war became somehow a matter of mental health. Were they crazy to be against war? A therapist could decide. My family worried about our boys: would they have to go off to fight?

  Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were also in the news. In 1954 de Beauvoir had published The Second Sex, a book I’d been assigned in my social studies class, and it had been a bellwether for the coming women’s consciousness movement, just beginning to take root in the United States. Like de Beauvoir, Sartre spoke openly against the war in Vietnam. In October 1964 he would receive the Nobel Prize in literature but refuse to accept it on the grounds that it would compromise his ability to be objective. It was a momentous action that caught the eye of the world.

  Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize and accepted, as was only right. His position on race could never be the subject of a compromise on objectivity.

  Earlier that year, in January, Arthur Miller’s After the Fall opened in New York. I attended the play at a theater in downtown New York with Mark Abramson, sitting so close to the stage that I could feel the heat coming off Jason Robards Jr. and hear the roar of Marilyn’s voice in his words. Around the same time Meet the Beatles was released in the United States, and the foursome would take the nation by storm with their first American television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  IN January and February 1964 my destinations were Spokane, St. Louis, Montana, Boston, and Vermont—the same kind of seemingly random scheduling that marks my concert life today. I don’t know how I did it then, and I don’t know how I do it now.

  On February 14, 1964, Jac Holzman gave me his own kind of Valentine’s gift—a big press party for my third album, Judy Collins 3, at a loft in Soho. Nina Holzman, Jac’s wife, had prepared this special party, wit
h mountains of her fabulous, homemade, concoctions. (In L.A. a couple of years later, she would start a catering business called Pure Pleasure. And her food really was pure pleasure, becoming over those years in New York one of the reasons to go to an Elektra listening party for an artist.) Just about everyone I knew in the folk music industry was in attendance: Art D’Lugoff, the owner of the Village Gate; Jack Goddard, who wrote about music for the Village Voice; Phil Ochs; Tom Paxton, who was making another record for Elektra; my producer, Mark Abramson; and everyone who had played on the album—Eric Weissberg, Chuck Israels, and the cellist Bob Sylvester. Jim Friedman was there, my friend who wrote songs with Shel Silverstein, as was Oscar Brand. Oscar and I have known each other for fifty years. He, like so many of my friends from that time, has recorded with Elektra: albums of sea chanties, patriotic songs from his native Canada, songs of protest.

  Oscar was among the original board members of the Children’s Television Workshop, which created PBS’s Sesame Street, one of whose intentions was to reach inner-city children. Although it has become an American institution, Sesame Street initially fell short of its goal in that respect, according to Oscar. Oscar groused about this fact so often, to Jim Henson and anyone else who would listen, that Henson named one of the Muppets Oscar the Grouch.

  Ian and Sylvia Tyson and Charlie Rothschild, my road manager, were at the party that night, as was my friend Lucy Simon, whom I had met the year before when I taught her and her sister Carly “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in the funky dressing room at the Bitter End.

  In the early 1960s Lucy and Carly formed a duo, and would release their first album, The Simon Sisters, on Kapp Records. “Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod” was a minor hit, and the album was followed by two more, Cuddlebug and The Lobster Quadrille.

  When Carly and I met, she was a few years away from her solo career. She would often tell me shyly that she felt like the odd singer out. She had stage fright and a crippling fear of travel. She had sworn never to fly if she could avoid it. But in just a few years she would dazzle the world with her writing and her sexy, articulate, wondrous songs.

  IN March 1964 I performed my first solo concert at Town Hall in New York. Harold and Jac suggested that we tape it, and Elektra would release the recording as my fourth album, The Judy Collins Concert.

  I wore a new green velvet dress. Nina Holzman sent me to Elizabeth Arden—my first time there—for a massage before the performance, to ease my trembling nerves. I was singing new material, and though I was not sick-to-my-stomach nervous—it was more like thrilled-to-the-core nervous—my body was in a knot. But somehow I knew the night was going to be splendid, a one-take concert of new songs for a new album. We were very brave and optimistic, but I knew we could pull it off.

  There were songs by Billy Edd Wheeler, a prolific and talented songwriter who would have his songs recorded by Bobby Darin, the Kingston Trio, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Kenny Rogers, and even Elvis Presley. Billy Edd was relatively unknown when I found three of his songs: the beautiful and evocative “Winter Sky,” “Red-Winged Blackbird,” and “Coal Tattoo,” one of the best work and ecological songs I have ever heard.

  Traveling down that coal town road,

  Listen to my rubber tires whine.

  You can hear those rubber tires whine and the wheels rock in his lyrics about the decimation of the forests in our relentless quest for more coal.

  Songs by Fred Neil, John Phillips, and Dick Weissman were also included. Dick, who was in the Journeymen with Scott McKenzie and John Phillips, wrote “Medgar Evers Lullaby,” a bedtime story about racial prejudice:

  Your daddy is dead and he’s not coming back

  and the reason they killed him was cause he was black.

  There were a couple of traditional songs that tore at the heart, such as “Bonnie Boy Is Young,” said to be loosely based on the story of a seventeenth-century arranged marriage.

  On “Wild Rippling Water,” Eric Weissberg and I play dancing guitars in the story of two lovers in the spring, and there is the Bob Dylan song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” The addition of a cello, later played by Robert Sylvester, a classical musician from Manhattan, gave this recording a new and strangely modern feel. George Martin had not yet written the string quartet parts for “Yesterday,” the Beatles song that would come out in 1965, but there was a musical feast going on in my own heart and head, and I was happy to break from convention. There had not been a cello on a folk recording yet; or if there was one, I did not know about it. Robert was a wonderful player and added a new dimension to the ensemble of my guitar, the guitar of Steve Mandell, and the classical bass of Chuck Israels, who could be heard regularly playing at the Blue Note with jazz pianist Bill Evans.

  A FEW weeks after my concert recording was done, Dick Fariña and Mimi Baez came down to the studios of WBAI in lower Manhattan to be guests on my radio show. Mimi, Joan Baez’s younger sister, was strikingly beautiful, with dark eyes and lustrous black hair that grew beyond her shoulders. Her nature was sweet, giving, and openhearted. Mimi’s dazzling looks caught at the throat, plunging many men (and even women) into ecstatic claims of love. They were a remarkable couple who had started writing songs as soon as they found each other. That day in the studio, Mimi played her Martin guitar; Dick played his Emerson dulcimer, the gift from his first wife, Carolyn Hester.

  I had become close friends with Fariña after we met at Montowese House when he was married to Carolyn Hester in 1961. I visited Carolyn and Dick on Martha’s Vineyard, and saw Dick often in New York City, where he had the habit of dropping in to stay at my apartments in the Village and later on the Upper West Side. (There is a quaint picture of Richard and me shopping with Mimi at Zabar’s, where we bought exotic cheeses and roamed the aisles while their German shepherd, Lush, waited patiently outside, greeting every customer with a bark and a wag.)

  By 1964, Dick had met Mimi Baez and won her heart, and then her hand. Their first meeting was at a picnic in a park near Chartres Cathedral in France. Mimi was just sixteen and still living with her parents. She later told me the story of how she got truly drunk for the first time that day at Chartres and threw up all over Dick. In lighter moments, she would say that had been the key to his heart, which was altogether possible; he was always wonderfully off in the way he interpreted what might be romantic.

  Mimi was over the moon about Fariña. Dick wooed her with letters and sometimes poetry—“Young girl, you chose the amber coil of a wish”—using references that occur often in his writing. His poem to me, which he wrote as liner notes to the album on which he and Mimi later played their wonderful songs “Hard Loving Loser” and “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” uses a similar scheme to describe the sound of my voice: “If amethysts could sing …”

  Against her mother’s and father’s protestations, and in secret, Mimi married her poet/writer/singer in Paris in April 1963. Mimi was only seventeen. A year later, when she turned eighteen, they had a celebration of their wedding in Carmel, California. So in June 1964 I headed out to Carmel to celebrate their marriage.

  There were flowers in Mimi’s hair, there was music from some local singers, and her sister Joan wrote and sang a song to her sister and her new husband. Dick and Mimi were happy together, and apparently Big Joan had overcome her objections. If she had not come completely around on Dick, at least she had begun to appreciate the joy Mimi took in her husband.

  After seeing them in Carmel, and celebrating this romance written in the stars, as Richard would describe it to me, I headed to Colorado to sing at Red Rocks, the outdoor summer venue in Morrison, just west of Denver. In the rugged, open-air amphitheater I sang all the songs I had just recorded, thrilled to be in my Rockies again, even if only for a few days. I saw my mom and my dad, and all my siblings. I had that feeling I always have in the mountains: I felt at peace with myself.

  I had Clark with me for most of the summer, in Colorado and in New York. My friend Linda Liebman accompanied us to the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and s
omeone took a great photo of Clark leaning on one of the fences, looking up at the stage, with Linda at his side. He got to sing and have meals with Pete Seeger and John Cooke, and he simply drank it all in. He loved the music, listening to guitar players, dancing to the banjos.

  After the festival, we went to Cape Cod with the Holzmans, where Clark played in the sand with Jaclyn and Adam, the Holzmans’ children, and we all ate grilled burgers and hot dogs. Then it was back to Storrs for Clark, and back home for me, to the nerve-wracking reality of the custody case, which was still unsettled.

  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964. At the same time, the situation in Vietnam was getting hotter with each passing month, with American and Vietnamese deaths piling up; in August, at the Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer would present the credentials for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, challenging the all-white Mississippi delegation.

  In August Bob Dylan turned the Beatles on to pot for the first time, and in September the Warren Commission released its report on the assassination of JFK, saying a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had killed the president. Also in 1964, Lenny Bruce spent four months in jail for obscenity; Michelle Obama and Glenn Beck were born; and it cost 5 cents to send a letter to your congressman or your lover.