Judy Collins Read online

  Today, on my trips to Colorado, going up to Vail from Denver, or back to Berthoud or Estes Park, I pass that park often. As you drive over a rise in the highway, suddenly the mountains appear in front of you. Often you can see a herd of buffalo a little farther down the hill, and then there are the picnic tables. I always look, and I always wonder how our lives would have turned out if we had stayed in those glorious mountains where my heart still yearns to be.

  But by then, the circus had begun and there would be no turning back.

  Chapter Eight

  Gates of Horn and Ivory

  And the ship, the black freighter

  Turns around in the harbor

  Shooting guns from her bow.

  —KURT WEILL and BERTOLT BRECHT

  (translated by Marc Blitzstein), “Pirate Jenny”

  SUMMER in Chicago, 1960. A big, sprawling apartment on the lake, on the South Side, a sublet from friends of the owners of the Gate of Horn. When Peter and I walked into this place our eyes nearly popped out. It was huge, luxurious, on the lake, and near the University of Chicago. It was only a few miles from downtown Chicago and the club where I would be working.

  The Windy City was hot as hell in the summer but even warmer with appreciation for artists and musicians, a real center of art, music, and culture. Chicago had harbored this richness going back more than a half century, when the World’s Fair of 1893 had brought together artists, architects, and visionaries of every kind. The city became a magnet for talent and boasted world-class theaters and a distinguished opera house. The lakefront, chosen for the site of the fair by Frederick Law Olmsted, offered a gleaming vista of white sails, green parks, and public gardens, with the Art Institute of Chicago and Louis Sullivan buildings strung along a winding boulevard of fine shops. There could hardly have been a better place to have a folk club where the music could flourish.

  Albert Grossman and Alan Ribback, both Chicago natives, founded the Gate of Horn in 1956. I would get to know both men well over those first years of working at the club, and I liked them both enormously. The club was a true gathering place for musical greatness and represented the tastes of the two owners.

  Alan and Albert told me that the name of the club came from the musings of Penelope in The Odyssey, who has a dream that she relates to a stranger:

  “… I dreamed of two gates, a gate of horn and a gate of ivory. I was told that dreams which make it through the gate of horn are the dreams that can come true.”

  The Gate would help many of my dreams come true.

  My first night at the Gate, I was still in a cast, and swung through the entrance on my crutches. Alan’s skeptical frown greeted me. After my first show, however, his face lit up with a smile.

  “You can sing here in a cast anytime,” he told me, “as long as you sing ‘The Great Selchie’!” It was his favorite song, and for many seasons he would insist I include it in my shows.

  Afterward, Alan and I shook hands on my salary: $125 a week. The following year he had me back at the Gate for $250 a week. He was honest, and a handshake was all it took.

  Alan knew what he liked and was generous to a fault. He had a limp from a childhood bout of polio. He introduced me to his Chicago friends, among them the actor Severn Darden from Second City; Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, the English comedy duo, who came through Chicago to perform; Nelson Algren, who wrote The Man with the Golden Arm; Barbara Siegel, who owned Barbara’s Bookstore and became a friend; and other club owners. The journalist Studs Terkel became a friend when he first interviewed me during an appearance at the Gate; Norm Pellegrini at WFMT put me on his radio show often when I worked at the club; Roy Leonard made sure folk music got on the airwaves in the Windy City; Ken Ehrlich produced a television program with the Canadian folksinger Leonard Cohen and me and would take the knowledge he gained from Midnight Special and Soundstage in Chicago all the way to the Grammys, which he has produced for decades.

  Alan regaled me with his intelligence and passion—for the music as well as the politics of the times. I learned a great deal from Alan, and through him I met and worked with some wonderful artists, from Theo Bikel and Sonny Terry to Cynthia Gooding, Odetta, and the South African singer Miriam Makeba. These were experiences that would help my life as well as my career in the folk music community into which I was being initiated, where I began to find my musical place.

  Albert Grossman appeared only from time to time at the Gate. He was the traveling partner, flying even then between New York, L.A., and Chicago, looking for artists to hire and, sometimes, to manage. I always liked Grossman and appreciated having a drink with him on his visits to Chicago, sharing his quiet, subtle humor. Some nights after my shows we would walk the windy streets of the Near North Side, talking or harmonizing on old sea chanties. I sometimes glanced over at Grossman as he spoke about all the artists he was looking to manage and all the groups he wanted to start, and he seemed to me like a barracuda waiting to pounce. (Bob Dylan, who first met Grossman at Gerde’s Folk City in New York and would become one of his first management clients, said Grossman looked like Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon.)

  It was at the Gate of Horn, in that little club in the center of Chicago, that I began to drink in a brew of diverse musical sources and genres and appreciate musical stories from different times and cultures.

  THAT first gig, I opened for Will Holt and his wife, Dolly Jonah. Will was always dressed to the nines in a tailored suit, a tie, and a crisp white shirt, and he wore his close-cropped hair neatly combed. He would pull out my chair for me, or hand me the crutch I was still using. I thought he was daring and amazing. Will and Dolly’s repertoire was wide-ranging. In the same set they might sing a Kurt Weill song, perhaps “Pirate Jenny,” and then “Lemon Tree,” a song that Will had written and Peter, Paul and Mary would make a standard. “Raspberries, Strawberries” was another of his compositions, which had been a hit for the Kingston Trio. Then he might sing “Streets of Laredo,” and Dolly might do a heart-wrenching version of “Surabaya Johnny” from Kurt Weill’s Happy End. I loved to hear Dolly sing this song. The lights framed her heart-shaped face in white while the rest of her body disappeared into the cigarette smoke and soft lighting. She staggered on her high black heels at the end, teetering toward the barstool that served as a chair on the stage behind her. She would kind of collapse and reach for her drink as the applause rose, and then toss back the contents of her glass and take a bow. It was all very startling and dramatic. Will would let her cool her heels, finishing the set with “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” a song based on a William Butler Yeats poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”

  Dolly would say, as I spun out the tenth or twentieth verse to a seemingly endless ballad, “When are you going to find some up-tempo material? The audience is dying here!” I thought they were merely mesmerized! But I did start, when I was working with Dolly and Will, to take some of the advice that Bob Gibson had already given me to lighten up a little. Still, Dolly would have to sit through a lot more long, sorrowful songs about drowned maidens and silver daggers.

  Will had begun his career in the 1950s, and by the time I worked with him he had made a couple of records for Stinson—The Will Holt Concert and Pills to Purge Melancholy, the latter a collection of happy-go-lucky mood-changing songs about therapy and self-help. Will had studied at Exeter and also at the School for American Minstrels in Aspen, Colorado. The school was started by the English countertenor Richard Dyer-Bennett, who recorded beautiful folk songs in a clear, vibratoless voice—and had I known, I would have tried to get over Independence Pass from Denver to study with him in Aspen.

  Will and Dolly became my friends. One of the things I learned from Will was that you could protest and be a force of change while looking dapper, being elegant, and having manners. You could cut like steel, sting like a wasp, go for the jugular with language, style, wit, and music while wearing a suit and tie.

  That first summer at the Gate of Horn reinforced the importan
ce of my life with my son and my husband. The years to come would be harder, as I began to travel on my own, sleeping in strange hotels, traveling all over the country, making my nights and my days as tolerable as I could, with one-night stands and fair-weather friends.

  But in the summer of 1960, in the thrill of my fourth truly grown-up, professional engagement, I went home to my husband and my baby every night, and it was heavenly—a loving and settled time. Sometimes Peter and I could find a babysitter and he would come to the Gate to watch me work. If we had been able to continue sharing our worries and our pleasures, our marriage might have stood the test of time.

  Chapter Nine

  Gerde’s, the Village Gate, and the Folk Blitz:

  Joan, Mary, Bob, Carolyn, and Richard

  Here’s to you, my ramblin’ boy

  May all your ramblin’ bring you joy

  —TOM PAXTON, “Ramblin’ Boy”

  BY 1960, I was a regular on the folk circuit. The Exodus, the Gate of Horn, Michael’s Pub, and the Gilded Garter had put me on the folk music map. I could earn a decent living, and Peter and I were both on upward paths in our careers.

  In August we traveled to Westchester, New York, for Peter’s brother Gary’s wedding to Minky (Mary Anne) Goodman. My most vivid memory (I was still in a cast from toes to hip) was meeting Ed Sullivan at the reception. We danced in the enormous, rose-strewn tent behind the Goodman mansion in Westchester. I drank a good deal, and when I fell into the pool, soaking my cast, it was Ed Sullivan who bent over gallantly and pulled me out.

  After the wedding, Peter, Clark, and I headed to the University of Connecticut. Our happy little family settled quickly into the lush, rolling hills forty minutes east of Hartford.

  Clark was walking, talking, beginning to name the birds and to sing a little bit. I would set my guitar in his lap and watch him giggle as he ran his hands over the strings, singing.

  “I like to sing Mommy songs,” he would say. Clark knew a lot of the words to songs like “O Daddy Be Gay” and “The Gypsy Rover.” He could hum along on most of them. I knew from the time he was two that he could sing. He had the family gene!

  While Peter taught at the university, I would leave Storrs to go out on the road, to Denver, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and Canada. We made friends in Storrs—some students, teachers, some couples—and really had a very good life there, though I was traveling much of the time.

  I knew, as I crossed the country, that I was one of the very few women singing folk music professionally at that time. Judy Henske, Carolyn Hester, Jo Mapes, and Cynthia Gooding were making recordings and singing in the clubs as well.

  And now it seemed that everywhere I went I heard about Joan Baez. Joan’s was a heart-wrenching, glorious voice. She chose mostly traditional songs. The photograph on the cover of her first album captured the essence of the gleaming, dark-haired queen of the folk movement. There was that hurt in her eyes, and her voice soared like saints rising.

  Bob Gibson was the first person to tell me about Joan. He had heard her in Boston, where she had begun singing, and described her to me: “Joan Baez is bare feet, three chords, and a terrified attitude!” In 1959 Bob called Albert Grossman, who along with George Wein, Pete Seeger, and Theo Bikel was creating what would become the Newport Folk Festival. Bob told Grossman that Joan would be perfect for the new venue. Robert Shelton of the New York Times was at first unconvinced that a big folk festival would go down well with the public. But that summer in Rhode Island, Grossman told Shelton, “The American public is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be kissed awake by the prince of folk music.”

  Joan’s appearance at Newport caused a huge sensation. She sang “The Four Marys” as well as an a cappella version of “We Shall Overcome.” Her performance was otherworldly, startling, unlike anything folk music fans had known. Grossman promptly took Joan under his wing, escorting her to Columbia Records to see John Hammond, the legendary producer who had discovered Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman, among many others. Joan found the company (and, she said, John Hammond) too slick for her. Then Albert introduced Joan to Maynard Solomon at Vanguard. Joan felt Maynard, and the label, were more akin to her style. Vanguard released Joan’s album that year and couldn’t press enough vinyl to fill the orders. Her name was on the lips of every promoter in the business. I was playing the same circuit, but making a record had never crossed my mind. To me, records were for learning songs.

  Like most Americans who had read about Joan Baez in Time magazine, I knew a great deal about her personal life and her politics before I ever met her. I knew that Joan had been born on January 9, 1941. Her mom, whom all of us who are her friends still call “Big Joan,” is Scot, and her father, Al, a physicist, was of Mexican descent. The family moved from New York to California, where Joan was raised with her two sisters, Pauline and Mimi. The family became Quakers when Joan was in her teens. I listened to her record, fainting with admiration.

  My little book of income shows that during the year 1961 I worked at the Gate of Horn from January 2 to January 29 and made $600. I worked through my mother’s birthday, through my brother Denver’s birthday. I stayed at the Cass Hotel, where I slept half the day and worked half the night.

  Odetta was a big part of the folk revival; her voice, her presence, those muumuus in silks and satins, in shades of blue and green and fuchsia that seemed to illuminate her ebony face, a face full of light and beauty. She had a smile that took in the entire room, and she seemed to embrace the entire world. I saw in her the promise of a better world for women, for singers, for blacks, for children, for everyone. She seemed, in her choice of songs and in her life, to be someone you could follow anywhere and she would never, never disappoint you. The 1960s, and the folk movement in its entirety, would have been less than what they were without Odetta. I believe that if we had a leader, a clarion call to arms, in the service of humanity, it was in the voice of this amazing woman.

  The first time I saw her, she was on the bill at the Gate of Horn the week before I opened, but I got to Chicago in time to see her show. Her performance swept me away. She walked onto the stage dressed in green silk, and I could smell the fragrance of whatever she was wearing, some exotic perfume. She took over every corner of the room with her energy and that powerful voice. She sang big, completely embracing songs, including “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “The Midnight Special,” “We Shall Overcome,” a terrifying song called “Gallows Tree,” and “All the Pretty Little Horses.” I listened that night as she, too, sang “Strange Fruit,” and I wept when I heard it.

  Odetta had recorded many of these songs for her 1957 Gate of Horn album. She was a favorite of Alan Ribback and in fact of the whole city of Chicago. I drew inspiration from her every time I saw her perform. Martin Luther King Jr. had called Odetta the “queen of folk music” (though he was also a good friend of the other queen, Joan Baez).

  IN my gig that January at the Gate of Horn that I would work again with the Tarriers, who had made a change in personnel. Bob Carey was out and Marshall Brickman was in. Eric Weissberg was still in the group, he on whom I had developed a terrible crush when we worked together at the Exodus. It went nowhere then, but always made seeing him a sweet experience. He is a fantastic musician, a guitarist and banjo player, with a thick head of hair (still!) and a solid, reassuring demeanor. He has a smile that is usually slow in coming but is worth waiting for. There was always something held back about Eric; he never made advances or said things that led you to believe he was sexually predatory, and a girl can tell, believe me. I have always found him attractive, and often ask him if all the girls were as wild about him as I was. He just smiles without divulging a thing, but I think that he is flattered by the suggestion, and that I am not so far off the mark.

  Marshall Brickman was a tall, good-looking, and musically impressive twenty-three-year-old who played beautiful banjo alongside Eric. He was Eric’s oldest friend from New York and had a sweet, deep baritone voice. I like
d his silences as well as his quick and facile wit. Marshall never bought a laugh at your expense. He would go on to play banjo with John Phillips in the New Journeymen (before John started the Mamas and the Papas) and then write for television on shows that included Candid Camera, The Tonight Show, and The Dick Cavett Show. He then spent many years writing Woody Allen movies. More recently he wrote the books for Jersey Boys as well as The Addams Family on Broadway. Marshall, Eric, and I have remained friends for more than fifty years.

  Every day I look at a color photograph of Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman, both playing the banjo. It’s a cover of an Elektra album they made later in the sixties called New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass. Standing beside them under a spreading chestnut tree in Central Park is my son, Clark, then about seven years old and looking up at these amazing musicians with wonder in his eyes. He loved their music, and loved being with them while they played.

  HOME to Connecticut after my four weeks in Chicago, I settled in with Peter and my baby. We were now in our farmhouse in Storrs, Connecticut, and after a couple of weeks of solace and silence I headed back down to New York to work for two weeks at Gerde’s Folk City, the center of the folk music boom in Greenwich Village.