Your father, Chuck Collins, was a singer and pianist who greatly influenced your early musical development. How would you describe your relationship with him and its importance in your beginnings as a professional singer?
Well, I was very fortunate because my dad was a wonderful singer and a very interesting man. He was blind from the age of four but didn't want to be known as different. He really insisted on getting around the world without a cane, without a dog, and he didn't want anybody to help him. He traveled, he went to the University of Idaho, graduated summa cum laude, had a great career, and was also extremely well educated. I was raised on what my father got from the Library of Congress. He got his braille books from there, whether it was Russian writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky or American writers like Mark Twain. That's also where he got all of his recordings—all the shows, you know: Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma!.
What did you learn from all the music he was bringing home?
He would pick out the very best songs. That's what I learned from him: to pick out the very best. But he would also get from the Library of Congress what he called ‘talking books.' So he got a lot of Shakespearean plays read by people like Judith Anderson and all the great English actors of the time. He was multi-talented. He had a radio show for 30 years. He spoke about politics. He spoke about the war in Vietnam. He spoke about Joseph McCarthy and Douglas MacArthur. And he was funny. He would tell Mae West jokes, you know, like, ‘I like restraint, if it doesn't go too far' (laughs). He really had a strong effect on me because I saw all these things that he did, and I wanted to do them.
First you started with classical music training, and then you transitioned into folk music. What made you want to take that route instead?
Well, I was always surrounded by music—so much of it. My father sang the Great American Songbook, you know, the songs of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. But he also sang Irish, English, and Scottish folk songs, like Danny Boy, with his best friend, Holden Bowler, who was a professional singer and had his debut at Carnegie Hall. So I knew those songs. And when I was about 16, I was listening to the radio instead of practicing the piano, which I was supposed to be doing, and I heard a song called The Gypsy Rover. I just flipped over it. I said to my father, "I don't think I want to play the piano anymore."
Well, it seems you didn't quite stick to that statement...
Of course, I'm sitting here today talking to you, Guido, but after we speak, I'm going to go into my studio and practice because I still practice the piano. I've been playing the piano now for 82 years, actually. It's been a long time (laughs). But the thing is, when I heard this song, I went down to the music store in Denver, where we lived, and I looked up on the wall. I saw Pete Seeger and The Clancy Brothers and Josh White. And, you know, I just fell in love with this music, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that. I started immediately learning songs, and my father got me a guitar. He rented it. And I always say, "Because he was an optimist, he had the feeling that I would fall out of love with this." But I never have.
You've long been recognized for helping bring attention to then-unknown artists in the 1960s. In 1966, on your fifth studio album, you were the first to record Suzanne and Dress Rehearsal Rag, both written by Leonard Cohen. How did you first come across his songs, and what drew you to his work so early on?
I was very friendly with a woman named Mary, a friend of Leonard's who went to school with him in Canada and grew up together. They all lived in the same neighborhood. She worked in the music business in New York, and we would all go have dinner and talk, and she would always mention Leonard because she and her friends thought that he was the smartest person they knew, and they were very disappointed because he was not going anywhere and didn't seem to be the great shining individual they thought he should be. But then, a couple of years later, Mary called me and said, "You know, Leonard wants to come in and play you his songs." She had told me previously that his poetry was very obscure, which is why they thought he was going to be a failure.
What was that encounter like?
He came to the house. He said to me, "I can't sing, I can't play the guitar, and I don't know if this is a song..." And then he sang to me, "Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river..." And I said, "Leonard, that is a song, and I'm going to record it tomorrow," which I did. I went straight into the studio with it.
Well, shortly after, you recorded a widely acclaimed version of Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell, which reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned you a Grammy. What do you recall from the phone call you had with her about the song?
Well, it was three o'clock in the morning in 1967, and my old friend Al Kooper, from Blood, Sweat & Tears, called me. He knew my phone number by heart, so I was the one who got the phone call because he had followed her home, and she told him that she wrote songs. When he got to her house, she sang him Both Sides Now. And he said, "Oh, hold on. I have to call Judy because she has to hear this. I know she's recording tomorrow." I've known Al for a long time, so he knew what I was up to. And he said, "I called you at three in the morning because I've got this girl that I followed home, and she really writes good songs." Then he put Joni Mitchell on the phone, and she sang me Both Sides Now.
What did you do next?
I called Jac Holzman, the president of Elektra Records, in the morning, and I said, "Guess what? You have to come over here for breakfast, and then we have to go over to this girl's house so she can play us this song." And he said, "OK, OK. I'll be right over." I was in the process of making Wildflowers, my sixth studio album.
Stephen Stills famously wrote Suite: Judy Blue Eyes about you, its lyrics tracing the arc of your relationship and eventual breakup. What was it like to hear that musical tribute for the first time?
He came to my hotel room in May 1969, and we had just broken up, but I didn't know about the song yet. So he brought me flowers, and he brought me a guitar—a beautiful guitar, which I still have. And then he sang me Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. When he finished singing, we were both weeping, and I said to him, "You know, it's beautiful, but it's not getting me back" (laughs).
But you happen to be friends to this day, right?
I have been friends with Stephen Stills for almost 60 years, and we have a wonderful friendship. In fact, he came to New York on March 8th, a couple of months ago, to join me at the end of a big concert I was doing with all kinds of people singing songs that I had either written or recorded. He came to the stage, and at the end, he and I sang Helplessly Hoping, one of the songs that I think he actually wrote for me, though he never said that. My husband Louis had just died in December, and they had been good friends. Onstage, Stephen said to me—and to the audience—"She married the right guy," which I thought was perfection. I mean, this is a guy who knows how to write lyrics for sure. It was very, very touching.
Didn't you tour together back in 2017 and 2018?
Yes, we did 115 shows over the course of a year and a half, and we had the best time. We were onstage for two hours, singing everything together. At the end of the show, we sang Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, all the choruses. We didn't sing the front part because he said, "Well, it's very insulting to you" (laughs).
In 1975, you chose to record Send in the Clowns, a song that was covered by many artists both before and after your version. How did your eclectic musical tastes guide you to that song?
Well, I was lucky that an old friend of Leonard Cohen's—who he introduced me to in 1966—was a woman named Nancy Bacal. They were so close that I believe she was one of the last people to see him alive. They lived in California, and she was in and out of his house like nobody's business. We became tight friends immediately when he introduced us. She was a wonderful, interesting woman and made a film about Ravi Shankar called Raga, which you should watch. His widow kept it off the market after Ravi died, but it's now available. Anyway, she and I lived close together here in New York. She called me up and said, "I'm bringing this record to your doorman. I want you to listen to this song and put the needle on the cut."