Last month, Judy Collins celebrated her 69th birthday at 35,000 feet.

"I was flying to South Korea to speak at a peace conference and to play a 'flower power' festival," she explains by phone from her home in New York City. For an artist whose social history has always been linked to her musical one, even personal milestones like birthdays must be observed on the fly.

"I was brought up in a family that believed you must take part and have a voice in the community," she notes of her active lifestyle.

On June 24, local music fans can catch up with the two-time Grammy winner when she performs live at The Jim Rouse Theatre, in Columbia. "I can't wait," says Collins of that upcoming appearance for the Columbia Festival of the Arts.

Those inclined to categorizing used to include Collins in the folk music boom. But that label didn't long fit her career or her iconoclastic repertoire. After some 50 years of recording and touring, she doesn't appear any closer to settling into a niche.

"I always have goals and I love to reinvent myself," she says. Her newest CD is "Judy Collins Sings Lennon and McCartney," a re-interpretation of songs from the rich Beatles songbook. Her voice is as clear as it has ever been on such Lennon and McCartney evergreens as "The Long and Winding Road" and "Norwegian Wood."

"We will be doing a lot of songs from the new CD," she promises Howard County ticketholders, "and some wonderful classics that I hope everyone will enjoy."

Collins was already established in her own career when Beatlemania broke on U.S. shores in the mid-1960s. She was a prominent fixture in folk music circles at age 22, thanks to her debut album, "A Maid of Constant Sorrow," in 1961.

Collins studied classical piano as a child with female conductor Antonia Brico, but when the singer discovered folk music, she traded in her Steinway for an acoustic guitar.

From the first time she heard the Beatles on the radio, Collins considered herself a fan. "We all played their records over and over," she says. "They were doing something truly creative and wonderful. When I put the needle on a Beatles album, I swooned along with everyone else."

Tuning in to her own voices

For the first six or seven years of her career, Collins recorded traditional folk songs and her own versions of songs by artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. "If a song is well known, then it's up to the artists who interpret it to make it their own," she says. "Personally, I have never recorded a song that I didn't love, because then I have no connection to the song."

It was Collins who helped introduce wider audiences to the songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. She befriended Cohen after meeting him in Greenwich Village, and encouraged him to set his poetry to music. The day after a young Joni Mitchell played her "Both Sides Now" on the telephone, Collins was in the studio recording it. In 1967, it won the singer a Grammy as Song of the Year.

It wasn't until several years into their friendship that Cohen encouraged Collins to try her own hand at songwriting. "It had never occurred to me before," she admits. "I don't know whether it was my classical training, but it just never really dawned on me. There were so many good songs to sing in those days, after all."

Collins' first composition was the hit "Since You Asked," from 1967's critically acclaimed "Wildflowers" release. "Most of the time, when a writer starts writing, or a painter starts painting, they are doing work that is autobiographical and that happened to me, too," she says. "After about 1981, I was able to make a shift and broaden my writing."

A fine example is the recent composition "Kingdom Come," a touching tribute to victims of Sept. 11. "We were doing a benefit for the New York City Fire Department and a captain showed me a tattoo on his neck which was the number 343," she explains. "That was the number of firefighters who died on Sept. 11. I was so taken by the symbolism that I had to write a song about it."

Collins says she aspires to write songs that are "timeless," and it's something she works hard at. "I have a system," she says. "I write in my journal on a regular basis. The thing that works best for me is being consistent. We all have moments of inspiration, but it's the person who is able to put these moments into some kind of form that are eventually able to create something."

Judy Collins performs live at The Jim Rouse Theatre, at Wilde Lake High School, in Columbia on June 24 at 7:30 pm. Tickets range from $55 to $40 and are available at Tickets.com or by phone at 800-955-5566.

user comments (0)