Judy Collins

by Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music

  But Camelot had lost its king, and a miasma of grief still hung over the nation, while Jackie Kennedy and the rest of the family continued sculpting and burnishing JFK’s legacy.

  IN August I went to Mississippi—a far cry from the quaint villages and idyllic beaches of Cape Cod—to help register African American voters in what would be referred to as Freedom Summer or the Mississippi Summer Project. Workers from the offices of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), two of the organizations sponsoring groups of volunteers to go South to ensure the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in racially segregated states, helped organize my travel. I flew into Jackson, Mississippi, where I was met by Barbara Dane, an activist and jazz singer from San Francisco whom I knew.

  Barbara had many admirers, including Louis Armstrong, and a solid reputation in the world of jazz. She had opened her own club in San Francisco called Sugar Hill, which featured great jazz and blues artists—Mose Allison, Big Mama Thornton, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, with whom I had worked in Chicago at the Gate of Horn in my first few days at the club in 1960. (Barbara later married Irwin Silber, a critic and the founder of Sing Out.)

  Barbara was thirty-seven when we met in 1964, a big-hearted blonde, outspoken and generous with her knowledge and her insight into what was going on in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. She helped me get settled in with other volunteer artists and lawyers at the Jackson Holiday Inn, introduced me to the people with whom I’d be traveling, and took me to my first voter registration rallies.

  The offices of COFO were on Lynch Street in Jackson. A number of workers in the Mississippi Freedom Project had already been beaten up by that time—eighty of them, according to the people I spoke to at the offices of SCLC. During the two weeks I was there, traveling from Ruleville to Greenville to Jackson and back, everyone knew Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Michael Goodman had been murdered. They had been abducted, tortured, and killed by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, their bodies buried in a muddy earthen dam. Fear pulsed along the roads and in the towns.

  I traveled with the New Gate Singers, a band of three long-haired, sweet-tempered kids from Chicago. We drove in their VW bus through the summer heat of Mississippi, stopping over in black neighborhoods and staying with black families, the only safe places for white rabble-rousers from the North. In the daytime, I would help the organizers I admired so much from CORE and sing for the crowds of people who gathered.

  Of the many moving and memorable experiences for me that summer, perhaps none left more of an impression than the few inspiring days I spent traveling with Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou came from Mound Bayou, Mississippi (home of the murdered Medgar Evers), and was nearly fifty-seven when I met her. She had been an activist most of her life, influenced by Thurgood Marshall, Mahalia Jackson, and other powerful civil rights leaders and artists. Fannie Lou had been working with SNCC since 1962. She and I talked in the van while I was changing the strings on my guitar, my hands shaking, as we prepared to stop at another site to encourage people to get out and register to vote. I could always feel the violence and hatred looming in the air of the towns we passed through, white faces pressed to windows, white men standing rigid in their yards, staring out from behind their fences, their eyes warning us to go home, telling us we had no business in Mississippi. I asked Fannie Lou if she was afraid.

  “Why should I be afraid?” she said. “They can only kill me, and seems to me they been trying to do that since I was a little girl!” Fannie Lou had already seen too much hardship and terror in her life—racism, beatings, and lynchings. In 1961, she had been sterilized without her knowledge or consent while having routine, minor surgery.

  “I have my faith,” she said. “I am not afraid.” I gazed out the window of the van at the cold and hate-filled faces in passing cars. I knew I would have to stay close to Fannie Lou and draw courage from her.

  In the heat of a poor black neighborhood in Ruleville or Greenville, where not a soul could be seen on the street, Fannie Lou would plant her feet in the dust in front of a gaggle of run-down houses. Then she’d open her mouth and sing:

  “Oh freedom,” she would belt. “Oh freedom!”

  Sweat would pour down her beautiful black face as she sang. A person or two would peek behind a curtain.

  “Oh freedom over me!”

  A door or two would open a crack, then another few inches. I stood beside Fannie Lou, starting to hum and harmonize.

  “And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave!”

  Before long, the doors would crack open in house after house, and men and women would shyly start to emerge into the sun, children sheltering between their legs as their mothers wiped hands on aprons, smiles beginning to form in their eyes and hearts.

  “And go home to my Lord and be free!” A chorus of a dozen, two dozen, maybe three, then five, would form around Fannie Lou, drawn by her big, round, full notes mingled with my voice. Her singing was like a winding summer vine, corralling their emotions, bringing them out of doors, luring them from their fear. When the yard was crowded with people, Fannie Lou would begin to speak about why she was there.

  “I want you to go down to that courthouse and I want you to register your name so that you can vote, put your money where your mouths are, and vote for the people you want to have in your government.”

  “But we can’t do that, they’ll kill us,” many would shout. Bull Connor was hosing people and bashing heads in Selma and white policemen were harassing and beating black people as well as activists all over the South for the attempts to get blacks out to vote, to eat in public places, to go to school together. People tried to keep their heads down and stay out of the way of the white police, who were armed with nightsticks, and the Klan, which was flourishing in Mississippi at that time. Many had seen crosses burned on their lawns, friends lynched.

  Fannie Lou would persist: “You have to do this, you have to use your voices.” Those who had not known they had voices would begin to shine in Fannie Lou’s light.

  For the days I traveled with her, I was a witness to her power. She revived my spirits, too, in that hot humid summer when the trucks passed us on back roads, gun racks visible in their windows, and I didn’t know if I should be more worried if the racks were full or if they were empty.

  “You got to have faith,” she would say to me as we tucked into our borrowed beds in a home one night. I had told her about my divorce and the ongoing custody battle. “You are going to get that boy of yours back, I just know it.” Faith was going to have to go a long way, but when Fannie Lou talked to you about faith, you felt certain you could do anything.

  I didn’t know whether faith would help, but by God I started praying again, all because of Fannie Lou Hamer.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Pack Up Your Sorrow:

  Russian Songs, Broken Hearts, and Max

  If somehow you could pack up your sorrows

  And give them all to me …

  —RICHARD FARIÑA AND PAULINE BAEZ MARDIN,

  “Pack Up Your Sorrows”

  IN September 1964 I started looking for a New York apartment big enough for Clark and me. The divorce hearing was scheduled for October 16 and the custody hearing for December 18, after which the judge would decide within a few months whether I would have my son with me. I had been advised by my lawyers to have an apartment in the city that could accommodate us both.

  I found a place on West 79th Street near the corner of Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. I was nearer to my shrink and in a neighborhood of big pre-war apartment buildings, solid and grand—large spaces that were home to artists and all kinds of interesting people, a world somewhat different from the hippies and folkies of Greenwich Village. I was happy to be there but missed the Village. One of my neighbors was Elisabeth Bing, the well-known Lamaze practitioner. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and his wife would come to see Elisabeth and stop by to visit. I had room for
Clark and was praying that Fannie Lou was right, that one day he would come to stay for good.

  By the end of September I was totally settled into my new home. I even had my piano moved in—an old, great-sounding Steinway on which I have written most of my songs. While the divorce hearing went quickly, the final decision on custody of Clark would not be reached for another five months. Meanwhile, Peter remarried on December 27, to the woman he had been living with since our separation, Sue Tanstall, who worked at the American Friends Service Committee in Boston.

  Harold Leventhal, my devoted manager, had been working for a number of months on a trip to the Soviet Union. The Cold War had kept most American performers off of the concert circuit in the USSR, but there was beginning to be a softening between the countries and a newfound taste for negotiation and appeasement in the arts as well as in politics. It was a window that would not be open long, but Harold thought he might be able to arrange a few shows in Poland and then in Moscow and other Soviet cities. He began to make real plans, talking to other artists about joining me. It would, in fact, be groundbreaking.

  As soon as I found out about the upcoming tour possibilities for the following year in the USSR, I went to the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village and signed up for Russian language classes. For such a trip, we would have to plan far ahead. Soon I could write a little Cyrillic and say a few phrases. It would be an exciting time, and I hoped by then that I would have custody of my son. Perhaps he could join me on this amazing journey. He was certainly old enough to come with me now, and would love the travel and the music, the adventure of being in a new and exciting place where few Americans had visited.

  I made another trip to Carmel in the fall of 1964 to sing and spend some time with Mimi and Dick in their little cabin near Joan’s. I visited with them one magical night in September 1964 and listened to their startling, unique songs, two of which I would record.

  Dick wrote “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” with help from Mimi’s sister Pauline—it seemed the family was falling in love with Richard, giving him the space he needed, embracing him. Dick and Mimi first played this and some of the other new material for me in their enchanted house. The fireplace crackled and its light danced on the walls that night. I can see Mimi’s fingers on the guitar and the dulcimer laid across Dick’s lap, the quill he used to play it with plucking the strings, as they sang this sweet, simple song. Dick was the dark-haired gypsy with the wickedly handsome smile and all those songs in his heart waiting to be written, waiting to be completed by a woman he loved. Mimi was that woman now, gifted and beautiful, and the song spun out between them like jewels floating in a pond of light.

  If somehow you could pack up your sorrows

  And give them all to me

  You would lose them, I know how to use them

  Give them all to me.

  I drank wine out of a silver cup, watched the fire, and listened. It was a truly mystical night of music and beauty.

  Back in New York one weekend in October 1964, the journalist Al Aronowitz, who had become a friend after he wrote a piece about me for the New York Post in his column “The Beat Generation,” invited me to Woodstock. We were guests at Albert Grossman’s rambling old stone mansion. Aronowitz had recently introduced Dylan to the Beatles. He and Bob were friends, and Bob, Suze Rotolo, Albert Grossman, and his wife, Sally, were all there. We had a fine evening of laughter, food, and talk of music and art, and I remember going to bed exhausted and happy.

  About three in the morning I was awakened by the sound of Dylan’s voice—which by then I knew well—drifting up the stone stairs outside my bedroom. I opened my door and, dressed in my best terry-cloth bathrobe, crept down the stairs to listen. I heard Dylan’s voice coming from a room at the bottom of the stairs, seducing and captivating as he sang, over and over, the lyrics and newly found melody to “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

  The walls of Albert’s Woodstock retreat and the stairs on which I was perched to listen to Bob were weathered fieldstone. I sat in my robe, shivering a little from the cool air but mostly from the sweet sound of Bob’s voice, and those lyrics that struck my heart. In the morning over steaming cups of coffee, I thought about the song and about the genius who had written it. When he came down at noon, rubbing sleep from his eyes and running his hands through his rumpled hair, I told him that I wanted to sing the song I had heard on the stairs. Once back in New York, I would record it for my new album, Judy Collins Fifth Album.

  IN 1965, after I had been living on the Upper West Side for a few months, and as preparations for the USSR trip were taking shape, I suddenly found myself facing an unexpected roadblock: I was having terrible trouble with my voice. I asked around for names of people to whom I could go for help, maybe a voice coach or singing teacher. They said I should seek out Max Margulis. I carried his phone number around on a tattered piece of paper.

  One day when I was so hoarse I could barely speak, I called the number I had been given for Max. A man answered, and I introduced myself in my croaking voice and told him he had been recommended to me. He asked for the names of those who had suggested I call him, and I mentioned Irma and Mordecai Bauman, who ran Indian Hill, an arts camp in the Berkshires, where Carly Simon, Arlo Guthrie, and many gifted musicians and artists had gone. Ray Boguslav, who played guitar for Harry Belafonte and was a serious, gifted pianist as well, had also told me that Max was the only game in town if you were looking for a great teacher. Max seemed pleased.

  Then Max asked me what kind of music I sang, and I told him.

  “Oh, you people are never serious,” he said, the graciousness gone from his voice. “I don’t want to waste my time.”

  “But I need help—I’m losing my voice all the time. I don’t know what to do.” I was truly becoming desperate. “Please, just let me come and talk to you,” I begged.

  He said no again, but less firmly. His voice softened. Finally he told me, “Well, perhaps we could talk. But only talk, you understand!” Then he gave me his address and went on, “You just ring the bell for 8B.”

  My mouth dropped open. I said I would be there within two minutes.

  Surprised, he said he just might be able to squeeze me in, and asked where I was.

  “I live next door to you, in 8A.”

  I walked out my door on the eighth floor of my building, took two steps past the elevator, and rang his bell. When he opened the door, of course I recognized him, a slight man with glasses—looking very much unlike the ogre I had spoken to on the phone. I could see he was prepared to frown, but a small smile came to his lips, and I sensed playfulness somewhere behind the frown. We had spoken in the elevator a couple of times, exchanging only the briefest of hellos, but our encounters had been pleasant.

  Max shook my proffered hand and invited me into the room. There was a blue rug on the floor. The walls were hung with original works of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, paintings and sketches. A parakeet sang from a small cage in the kitchen, and the scent of roasting chicken filled the room. Max gestured toward the Steinway grand that took over one corner, and we began.

  “If you just stay faithful to what we are doing,” he told me that day and for all the days that came, “it will change your entire life. Singing and the study of the voice is the most complete therapy there is, because it engages the lungs, the brain, the body, the soul, and the spirit.” Throughout my years with Max, he would emphasize two principles: “Clarity and phrasing are the secret.”

  I endured the fight to get beyond the break in the voice, which all singers have and which the bel canto technique addresses. Bel canto, Max told me, is the Italian vocal style that includes a perfect legato line throughout the range of the voice, from top to bottom, and the use of a shimmering tone in the higher registers but without noticeable vibrato. In bel canto, Max would say, the voice should always be flexible, clear, and unencumbered by shouted phrases or harshness of tone.

  Of course, this sounds deceptively simple. Transforming a rough, uneven
voice that was “natural” but had great flaws took more than three years. I might get over the break between the upper and lower registers easily one week but at the next lesson be unable to do so. Max would sit at the piano; I would stand, a cup of tea prepared by Max’s wife, Helen, in front of me.

  Helen was a pianist and cellist with dark hair to her waist who always made me tea and let her parakeet, Papageno, sit on my shoulder. He was named after the character in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Sometimes toward the end of a lesson Helen would come stand in the archway to the kitchen and listen.

  “That was a wonderful sound you were making there,” she would say. “That was so clear.” They had been married for years. She was from Texas. Max would tell me he never went to Texas after the first time because of the chiggers.

  Max’s father had been an opera singer in Chicago, and Max himself was an accomplished violinist. He had been friends with Gorky and de Kooning when the painters first came to New York—de Kooning as a stowaway—in the late 1920s. The trio shared a cold-water flat in lower Manhattan and one winter coat, which they passed between them when a trip to the freezing outdoors was required. Max had observed (aloud, no doubt, since they were very forthright with one another) that de Kooning seemed unable to paint hands accurately, and de Kooning responded by painting a picture of Max with hands not exactly perfectly formed and giving the painting to Max. It was this painting that Max got permission from de Kooning to sell—it eventually wound up in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—so that Max could buy the rare Guarneri violin he had coveted all his life.

  In the 1960s, Max taught singing to Italian tenors and basses and French sopranos who left a scent of exotic colognes in the hallway and the elevator. He taught Laurence Olivier to sing for the movie The Entertainer. He wrote for The New Masses, one of the left-wing papers of the time. He loved Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti, and Ella Fitzgerald. He seldom ventured out to see anyone in anything, but when he did go out, you knew it was going to be something worthwhile.