Judy Collins Read online

  I convinced my father to get me a guitar. I started teaching myself to play, developing the necessary calluses on my fingers and silently panicking about the inevitable confrontation with Brico over my new musical love affair. My imperious teacher, a masterly pianist and a great conductor, obsessively pursued perfection both in herself and in her students. I knew from experience that she would fly into a rage when she found out I was playing folk music. I kept it from her for as long as I could.

  And then, on another Saturday that spring, “Barbara Allen,” sung by Jo Stafford, came over the radio and joined the battle for my heart and soul.

  ’Twas in the merry month of May, when the green buds were swellin’

  A young man on his deathbed lay for the love of Barbara Allen.

  I knew Jo Stafford’s voice from her hits—“Shrimp Boats,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “You Belong to Me.” She had a voice as smooth as honey, rich in tone, and clear in diction. She had sung with the Pied Pipers as well as Frank Sinatra. In 1950, long before the advent of the “crossover” phenomenon, Stafford made the album American Folk Songs at the height of her popular success. In fact, the album was part of a folk music revival that was taking hold around the country. “Barbara Allen” was on that album, along with “Shenandoah” and “Black Is the Color.” Before I ever heard of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, Jo Stafford and Elton Hayes, the singer in the movie, put me in touch with the beauty and wonder of folk music.

  Chapter Three

  Lingo the Drifter

  I am a poor wayfaring stranger

  Traveling through this world of woe.

  —Traditional, “Poor Wayfaring Stranger”

  MY evolution into a folksinger coincided with the arrival of Lingo the drifter, who came to Denver that year. This traveler, troubadour, and philosopher just showed up one day at my parents’ house and changed all of our lives.

  A singer of the songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Lingo had a radio show in Denver. He was a fan of Daddy’s show, and stopped by to introduce himself and show his respect. Lingo strode into the house as if he had known us all his life, and dramatically doffed his Stetson, a worn and shapeless old thing with a small pine sprig sticking out of the brim.

  He was a rugged-looking man with penetrating deep blue eyes under dark, long hair. He sang in a straight, clean, vibratoless voice, and sometimes I would join in. In his buckskin trousers and turquoise bolo and that godforsaken hat, Lingo would stake out his territory in our living room and proudly sing the songs of the new folk revival.

  He seemed to make Daddy happy right from the start—perhaps my father sensed that Lingo shared his love of whiskey. They formed a friendship, I think, over their love of books and politics, as well as their love of alcohol.

  Lingo soon was practically a part of the family. He said he was originally from Chicago. (Studs Terkel later told me that Lingo, whom he remembered as Paul Lezchuk, had lost his wife and child in an automobile accident, and had disappeared from the Chicago scene.)

  During the many long Sunday afternoons he spent at our house, Lingo told us about his life. He said that he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and that his platoon was among the first to reach Hitler’s death camps. He returned to Chicago, scarred by what he had seen, and enrolled at the University of Chicago on the GI Bill.

  Lingo had by then founded what he would call the Dormant Brain Cell Research Foundation, an informal intellectual movement (perhaps a movement of one, at least at the start) that studied the human capacity to forget or ignore all our experiences and repeat the same tragic mistakes again and again.

  Lingo came to Colorado and played the local joints around Denver. He quickly established himself as the hometown authority on folk music and radical politics. An admiring program director at a Denver radio station found a slot for him on Friday nights. Lingo filled the Denver airwaves with a mixture of traditional songs and the music of Woody Guthrie, which he performed live on his sweet old Martin guitar. He sang a lot of songs that I later came to understand were songs of the Almanac Singers, the first group Pete Seeger joined in New York in 1941 when he began writing music.

  Lingo loved to drink Daddy’s whiskey, wangle an invitation from my mother to stay for dinner, and talk philosophy and politics.

  “Let me sing you a song or two by a couple of great American heroes,” he would say. “This one is by Woody Guthrie.” Woody’s great song about Mexican immigrant farmworkers, “Deportee,” might follow. Then he might sing a song by Pete Seeger, maybe “Hold the Line,” which Pete wrote about the Peekskill riots in 1949, when Paul Robeson tried to sing for union members and heads were busted and bricks were thrown. Or maybe “Lonesome Valley”:

  You gotta walk that lonesome valley,

  You gotta walk it by yourself.

  There was history and passion in these songs, and when Lingo performed, his eyes blazed. I understood it as the light of defiance, the light of the true believer. My father and Lingo both believed, in their own ways, that music could save the world. With whiskey, the voices of Lingo and my father would rise, and as often as not, they’d belt out “Los Cuatros Generales,” the bittersweet song of the Spanish nationalists that spoke of the loss of the good men and women of Spain, the loss of freedom, their political defeat that preceded World War II. The song’s optimism is premature.

  The four insurgent generals,

  They tried to betray us,

  At Christmas, holy evening,

  But your courageous children,

  They did not disgrace you.

  The song, with its soaring melody and urgent tempo, made me cry. It was a song of the people, trying to bolster them against their fears, trying to win the war with music, as we would always try to do.

  Lingo was probably the first real hippie I ever met.

  I was learning that this thing called folk music had been around for a long time, and that the roots of folk music are ancient, probably growing out of a troubadour tradition that had begun before written history. Kings and rulers from antiquity often had singers and troubadours in their pay who would put sagas and love poems to music and soothe the long nights with their lyricism. Blondel, Richard the Lionheart’s troubadour, saved his master’s life by hunting out all the prisons where he might be kept and singing a song outside the castle walls until he heard Richard’s response. He then sent for help to free his king.

  I knew from my classical training that composers often borrowed from the trove of traditional melodies when creating themes for symphonies or arias for great operas. But I hadn’t realized how richly folk music had inspired twentieth-century classical music. Aaron Copland used a traditional shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts,” in Appalachian Spring. Even Igor Stravinsky, though he contorted their harmonies, made use of the folk melodies from his Russian heritage to embellish his Rite of Spring.

  In addition to the Dylan Thomas poetry they read together—Daddy from his Braille edition and Lingo from his ragged hardbound copy—the two men found common ground in politics. The war in Vietnam had begun with the use of “military advisers” after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. When the French got out of Indochina, the United States got in. Daddy and Lingo slung the fate of Indochina around our living room, swearing and shouting, their voices rising with the amount of whiskey they imbibed.

  “We should not dig ourselves into a conflict we can never win,” my father would say. “What do those sons of bitches think they are doing?”

  Lingo and my father reinforced each other’s point of view, though it often sounded like another argument. “Don’t they know these people? They fought off the French, for God’s sake!” Lingo would shout.

  “As well as the Japanese and Genghis Khan!” my father would add. “And anyway, it’s all about the natural resources. Everyone knows it!” And with a dramatic wave of his arm Daddy would knock over his glass for emphasis.

  When she heard Lingo’s remarks, my mother would just smile, and then wi
th a kitchen towel she would pat the arm of Daddy’s chair dry of the spilled whiskey and sometimes even bring him another full glass.

  My sister, Holly, was only a toddler at the time, but when she got a new kitten, a beautiful blue point Siamese, my father named him Dien Bien Phu. Ironically, the cat managed to outlive the Vietnam War, but just barely.

  My father convinced Lingo that, with his brains and insight, he should try to get on one of the new television shows coming out of Hollywood. Daddy even helped him get in touch with some of the people he had known there. In 1956 Lingo landed a spot on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life. Lingo always wore his same old buckskins on the broadcasts, looking like he’d just come down from the back side of a mountain in Colorado.

  “I played the part of a backwoods mountain man to perfection,” he told us, “because that is who I am!”

  On a Saturday night in October, Lingo was on You Bet Your Life with Groucho throwing him questions. My family and I were all sitting around the TV set, happily watching the mountain man who had been a fixture in our living room. All of a sudden my father began pounding his chair and waving his fists, as he had always done in the shouting matches with Lingo about politics.

  “Lingo does not, by God, know that answer! This show is rigged!”

  Daddy believed he knew everything there was to know about the workings of Lingo’s brain and was convinced his old buddy had been prompted. A few weeks later, Twenty-One, the ranking quiz show in Hollywood and on TV, was discovered to be leaking questions to Charles Van Doren, son of Pulitzer Prize–winning author, critic, and poet Mark Van Doren. (Later the scandal was chronicled in Robert Redford’s film Quiz Show.)

  Lingo earned a pot of money from his game show success and called a real estate agent in Colorado to ask if anybody had a mountaintop for sale. The agent found Lookout Mountain for Lingo, who bought the property with a rucksack full of cash and went up there with an axe.

  “I built my place with a guitar, three chords, nine folk songs, and sixty-four thousand dollars!” Lingo told me. He invited my father, mother, and me to come up to his cabin on Saturday nights to hear the “folk music circle,” a group of twenty-odd singers, pickers, storytellers, and assorted hippies. The air was so clear in those days that, from his aerie, the lights of Denver looked like sparkling diamonds.

  We sang together under the stars at Lingo’s mountaintop “This Land Is Your Land,” “Roll On, Columbia” (about the dam on the Columbia River), and “Los Cuatros Generales.” Lingo would feed us borscht and homebrew and we would muse about injustice and freedom and how we would fight for our beliefs. I had been primed for those politics in my family anyway; true-blue FDR Democrats, we were raised to be rebels, to be outspoken about politics. Each one of us Collins children was going to try to change the world.

  Lingo taught me a great deal, sharpening my understanding of what the folk tradition was and what it wasn’t. In a strange way, this eccentric singer guarded the door through which I was destined to pass. He knew the songs and held on to a ragged sense of hope despite the ups and downs of life. Like my father, Lingo possessed unbounded enthusiasm. He would leave his mark on me and help inspire me to pledge my life to folk music.

  When my father and Lingo told me that I could change the world, I believed them.

  Chapter Four

  My Buddy

  Nights are long since you went away

  How I think about you all through the day.

  —WALTER DONALDSON and GUS KAHN, “My Buddy”

  MY father was a fiercely proud man. His sight began to fail almost from his birth on an Idaho farm in 1911. By the age of four, he was totally blind. On the farm, he did the chores, carried water, and hauled wood, and his parents had no idea that they should treat him differently than other children. There was work to do, and perhaps from that hardscrabble life came his determination not to appear handicapped. At seven, he was sent to a special school in Gooding, Idaho, and lived away from the farm with others who were “challenged.” There he realized how different he was, and sought advice from his teachers on how sighted people held their heads, opened their eyes, and smiled their bright smiles. He put these into practice and was so convincing, even to these teachers, that they often asked him to escort others who could not hear, and often could not see, to go ice skating or take trips to town. When they remembered with a shock that he was blind, they just said, “Not to worry, Charlie knows where he is going!”

  From his teenage years, Daddy always wore hand-painted glass eyes to cover the ravaged scar tissue left when he lost his sight as a child. They were a very beautiful blue and my mother ordered them from a little factory in Colorado. They arrived nested in what appeared to be an egg box, two dozen at a time. As distinctly as I remember the sound of his voice, I remember the sound of one of Daddy’s glass eyes shattering against the bathroom tiles every once in a while as he put them in or took them out morning and night.

  He discovered music early, learning the piano and honing his fine clear baritone as a young man. He combined those talents with his natural gregariousness and storytelling skills in a radio career that spanned nearly thirty years. He never shied away from politics. Daddy was funny, flamboyant, and theatrical, whether performing on the radio, sitting in someone’s living room, or holding court at our piano.

  He never had a seeing-eye dog to help him around, nor did he ever use a cane, and if he walked into your house, even drunk, you might think he had lived there all his life from the ease with which he made his way from room to room.

  When he was sober, my father saw more than anyone I have ever known, and it was his inner vision that captivated all of us—strangers, friends, and his children alike. He was a hero of a man who overcame demons every day and was determined to live to the full. We knew we had a giant of a father, one who had been through his own fire.

  Daddy’s college experience loomed large in his memory, both for the friendship he found as a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and for the work he did while a student. He was already writing, to great success. He had a job with the Moscow, Idaho–based Bonner County Daily Bee to cover the World’s Fair in 1933 and rode the rails to Chicago with his friend John Spaulding.

  I met with Spaulding in Bainbridge Island, Washington, in 2003, when he was in his nineties. John still couldn’t get over the fact that he had jumped railroad cars from Moscow, Idaho, to Chicago and back with a blind man, but he said, “Chuck said he could do anything I could do, and we didn’t have any money and he wanted to go to the World’s Fair and convinced me we could go by train and never have to pay a cent. I thought he was crazy, but he was up for it, and soon so was I.” All my father’s old friends remembered Daddy’s talent and energy and intelligence, and talked about the sheer delight of joining him on his adventures.

  My father could captivate just about anyone. My mother, Marjorie, met him on a bus in Seattle on the day before his radio debut in 1937. She fell in love with him when she heard him sing “My Buddy” on his first radio show. She was listening with her best friend, Eileen, and by the time he had finished the song, she was in tears, telling Eileen she was going to marry that handsome Charles Collins. Indeed, they married quickly, and she remained smitten, even when he broke her heart.

  My father’s career in radio took off, and the young couple soon found themselves in Hollywood, where Daddy landed a show on NBC. In those years, between the ages of four and nine, I rode in childhood glory in the backseat of our slope-backed 1942 black Buick when Mother drove my father to work at the studios where many of the classic radio shows were produced. We met the Cisco Kid and were in the studio audience for broadcasts of Let’s Pretend. We met the Shadow himself. We met Red Skelton, Bob Hope, and later George Shearing. Mercedes McCambridge—whom Orson Welles called “the world’s greatest living actress”—was an acquaintance of my dad. My father’s drinking was already a problem, and Mercedes and he would have a few drinks together. I think it was Mercedes who told my father that i
f he wanted to quit drinking he had to go to AA.

  We moved to Denver in 1949, and my father impressed everyone he met. Chuck Collins, father of five, husband of Marjorie, was famous there; people adored him for his beautiful voice, his wonderful radio show, and his uplifting optimism. He was a charismatic man. Sometimes he would perform the poems of Don Blanding, such as “Vagabond’s House,” a poem that evoked all my father’s lost dreams and yearning. People would be in tears at the end of the poem, to which he played an improvised, rippling accompaniment.

  When I have a house … as I sometime may …

  I’ll suit my fancy in every way.

  As the years went by, my four siblings and I—his “little brood,” as he called us—all basked in his popularity, his open-handed generosity, his welcome greeting to everyone he met. His elegant clothes were immaculately tailored to his slightly stocky frame, his shoes shined to a bright polish. He walked with his back straight and his head thrown back, and if he ran into a wagon or a skate on the sidewalk, so be it; to him, the cuts and bruises were badges of honor.

  As children, we were always delighted that our father could read to us in the dark, from Moby-Dick to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. When the lights went out we were comforted by the presence of our father’s voice and the imaginary lantern that lit our way to other worlds.

  Daddy decorated the landscape of his life with literature, music, and the allure of ideas. His every sense was delicately tuned to the world around him. He was, in many ways, a Renaissance man, well read, eager to learn, ready for the next insight, the next idea. He was also terribly vulnerable at times, and anyone who knew him had to beware of hidden pitfalls, such as his not wanting help from anyone. We all—friends and children alike—walked a delicate line between offering too much help and too little, knowing he could not see us but also aware he always knew where we were.