Judy Collins Read online

  After hearing Dylan that afternoon, I went to the food tent, looking for tea to warm me from the rain. I then poked my head under the eaves of the hotel, where I ran into Carolyn Hester, coming back from the stage. She, too, was on a tea search.

  Carolyn was strikingly beautiful, with shining brown eyes and a chiseled, delicate face. She could have been a movie star. She had a high, sweet voice, a soprano with a kind of quiver that touched your heart when she sang those heart-wrenching songs that I loved; “The Praties They Grow Small,” “Brave Wolfe,” “Simple Gifts,” and “Cuckoo.”

  The Cuckoo is a pretty bird, and she sings as she flies

  And she never hollers cuckoo till the fourth day of July.

  She also had a kind of kinetic energy you could feel. Even as she stood there on a muddy path at an obscure music festival—rain-spattered, her hair limp from the humidity—Carolyn was a knockout.

  She had made her first record in 1957, the year I graduated from high school. It was called Scarlet Ribbons, on the Coral label in Texas. Born in Waco in 1937, Carolyn was known as the “Texas Songbird.” I picked up a copy of the album at the Denver Folklore Center and listened over and over to her sweet, lilting voice.

  As we walked and sipped our tea and heard the bluegrass players warming up onstage, I told her I had fallen in love with her version of “She Moved Through the Fair.”

  Don Heckman, of the Los Angeles Times, described Carolyn as “one of a small but determined gang of ragtag, early-’60s folk singers who cruised the coffee shops and campuses, from Harvard Yard to Bleecker Street, convinced that their music could help change the world.” John Hammond signed Carolyn to Columbia in 1959. She had also caught the eye of Al Grossman, and said that Grossman had wanted to put her in a trio—first with Bob Gibson, then with Peter Yarrow and Noel Stookey.

  Carolyn was on a fast track to stardom by now. Like some of the other “ragtag” folk girls, she focused primarily on traditional music and other songwriters’ songs, but she also wrote her own contemporary compositions. She turned down Albert’s offer to trio with Noel and Peter, leaving the door open for the fierce Mary Travers. (By 1964 Carolyn would even be on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Her lilting voice was compared to Joan’s and sometimes, later on, to mine.)

  She had met Dylan only a few months before, when Dylan talked the owners of a club she was playing in Boston into letting him open for her. The two bonded over their shared love of Buddy Holly and spoke of performing together more, and even about the possibility of Dylan playing harmonica on one of Carolyn’s albums. (Dylan would play on her Columbia album in September of that year.) I remembered seeing a picture of Carolyn in Life magazine, with Bruce Langhorne and Bill Lee, Spike’s father, who also played bass for me on many occasions; Dylan was in that picture as well, and Carolyn shone like a diamond in a patch of autumn grass.

  “I just got married,” she said that day in Connecticut, lifting her hand and wiggling her ring finger, where a small diamond sparkled in a gold setting. As she spoke about her new husband, she exuded happiness. In real sixties fashion, she had impetuously married a man she had known for only eighteen days.

  “I want you to meet Richard!” She took me by the hand and led me to her room, where her new husband, the mysterious and handsome Dick Fariña, was lying on the bed playing the guitar, candles burning all around him.

  With his dashing good looks and magnetic charm, Dick Fariña was undeniably seductive, sure to capture your heart as quickly as he caught your eye. He had dark hair and sparkling eyes that seemed to fathom you as he held your gaze. Dick’s sense of humor and his appreciation of life’s absurdities appealed to me, and we were destined to become friends. In the years we knew each other, I never laughed so hard with anyone else, or felt so close to either madness or sanity. He brought out my giddiness and made me feel young and vulnerable. I adored him.

  He had flown into Carolyn’s life, seeming to arrive out of nowhere, the same way he floated into all our lives—like some powerful visitor from another, very romantic world. By the time he and Carolyn met, Dick had heard Jean Ritchie play a dulcimer at a party in New York, and he’d adopted the instrument himself. He played in a very nontraditional way, sometimes turning the delicate dulcimer into a rhythm instrument. As a wedding present, Carolyn gave him a beautiful handmade Emerson dulcimer.

  Richard climbed quickly aboard Carolyn’s rising star, riding it as far, some people said, as it would take him.

  “Where did you two meet?” I asked as I lay between them on the velvet coverlet of their double bed. The light of several candles glowed around us. Carolyn smiled at Dick.

  “At the White Horse Tavern,” she said, referring to the legendary bar in the West Village where Dylan Thomas finished drinking himself to death a couple of years before I arrived in New York. “Tommy Makem introduced us, and this beautiful boy seduced me,” she said.

  Fariña, like Dylan, told some tall tales about where he was from and what he had done, and some of his stories were as exotic as Dick appeared to be, involving things like fighting in Cuba, meeting Hemingway, and running with the bulls in Pamplona. Some were actually true, and others were pure fiction. Although he really had gone to Cuba as he claimed, Fariña was born and raised in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn Tech. Dick wanted to be an engineer but then got a scholarship to Cornell and eventually majored in English. He got to know Peter Yarrow and Thomas Pynchon at Cornell, and he published articles for a few national magazines, including the Transatlantic Review and Mademoiselle, before finding his way to New York.

  Carolyn sang “She Moved Through the Fair” for me that night, her dark hair shimmering in the candlelight. The song was gorgeous and so was she. She and Richard sang some oddly touching new songs of his as well.

  Dick met Bob Dylan that weekend, triggering a sort of high-powered duel between the two men for primacy among philosopher-poets of the counterculture. Although it seemed very real at the time, I think the duel played itself out mostly in Fariña’s fertile and gifted mind.

  Two years later, Dick and Carolyn would divorce, and Fariña would marry another singer with a rising star in the family—Mimi, the younger sister of Joan Baez.

  Chapter Ten

  The Lark in the Morning

  The lark in the morning

  She rises off her nest

  She goes home in the evening

  With the dew on her breast.

  —Traditional, “The Lark”

  IN 1961 I began to make my first album.

  Maid of Constant Sorrow captured the collection of songs I had honed on the road and sung all over the country. Jac set up the recording at Fine Sound on West 57th Street. He was a stickler for the right song sequence and to this day has never lost that instinct for what goes with what, to best serve the musical journey you want your listener to take. Jac brought on Fred Hellerman, from the Weavers, and Erik Darling, who founded the Tarriers and was also in the Weavers at that time.

  The songs on that first album were the foundation of my early repertoire. Each one spoke to me in its unique way at that moment in my life. But what amazes me is how those songs have continued to resonate with me through the years. I believe that this album defines my love of people, politics, and life itself. There are songs about war and our addiction to it; about passions that leap out from our ancient, primitive beliefs and hopes; songs about the agony of young men dying, all over the world, for all time; and about miracles as well.

  Other songs on the album remind me of my father. “Bold Fenian Men” and “The Rising of the Moon” both honor the Irish who stood up to free their land from the brutal English yoke. I was drawn to the passionate imagery and lyricism of these songs as well as to their politics. My love affair with “The Rising of the Moon” is deep and enduring. Even now I can hear the powerful lyrics, the sound of the river singing beside the marching Irish men at night.

  “Wars of Germany” is about the tragedy of war as seen through the eyes of those who stay
behind, while “Tim Evans” takes on another form of barbarism: capital punishment. By the great Scot writer Ewan MacColl and his wife, Peggy Seeger, Pete’s half sister, it tells the haunting tale of a man hanged for a murder he did not commit.

  There were songs, too, about the trials and triumphs of love. “The Prickilie Bush” is the story of every girl who was ever brought down by her passion and her curiosity, the lover of her choosing—perhaps a carefree wanderer, a gigolo, a rogue—leaving her when she needs him the most. “Sailor’s Life” describes how often lovers are parted by work, sometimes for years.

  “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a haunting song that combines a deep connection with nature and a yearning for love that will not fade. I learned it from the McPeake family of Belfast.

  FROM the beginning of my life as a singer I knew immediately whether a song was meant for me. There are songs I will never sing because they have a phrase I would never speak. Language is so very intimate and vital, and I choose only those songs that reflect the way I might say things. I am sure I learned this in the womb, from the panoply of long-forgotten ancestors who sang all kinds of music, as well as from the talented choices my father made in his years on the radio. This is a continuation of a family business, and I believe it started long before I knew my own name.

  When Maid of Constant Sorrow was finished, I felt as though I had just graduated from the kiddie pool, where everyone screamed and splashed water everywhere, and was finally being allowed into the grown-ups’ pool, where you could drown. I wasn’t going to drown. I couldn’t swim yet, but I knew I would learn. I would stay close to Jac, and to safety.

  I was a professional now, with a record, work, a family to support. We celebrated when we were finished recording, but as exciting as this first recording experience was, I recognized that it also came with a tremendous responsibility to myself, to my family, and to the music.

  Maid had taken only a few days to record. I was back in Storrs when the completed album arrived in the mail at the end of summer in 1961 with Lida Moser’s lovely photo of me on the cover, that dark shot she took in the ruins of an old church in Greenwich Village. August in Connecticut was sweet and homey. The fireflies were out in the evenings and the water was cool in our secret swimming hole, sheltered by the woods. We grilled sausages and corn and chicken outside, walked in the woods, played with Clark, sang songs, and spent time with our friends from the university. The satisfaction of having my own record out was sweeter still, and I felt completed in a way that I’d never felt before. I was going to do this—be a singer, someone who had a calling, a profession, and a direction.

  I had a record. I had arrived.

  Chapter Eleven

  Golden Apples and the

  Beginning of the Affair

  Tell me who I’ll marry

  Tell me who he’ll be.

  —Traditional, “Tell Me Who I’ll Marry”

  JAC Holzman told me it was now time I had a manager for real. I said I had already met one, through Marshall Brickman of the Tarriers. Jack Rollins was a good-looking, polished, and sophisticated man who managed Woody Allen. I had been very excited about our meeting, but Rollins told me that although he liked my work, he was waiting for Jo Mapes to make up her mind as to whether or not she wanted to be a star, and if she decided to go for it he had to be available for her.

  Jo had a promising career. She performed in all the best clubs, and in the early 1960s she sang in the Rooftop Singers, with Erik Darling, Bill Svanoe, and Lynne Taylor. They had a hit with “Walk Right In,” which reached number one on the Billboard charts. So Jac was holding out for Jo; another woman singer would take up too much of his time.

  It was a good line; it may even have been true.

  Holzman then set up an appointment for me to meet with Harold Leventhal in Harold’s office at 250 West 57th Street, near Carnegie Hall. Inside, the walls were lined with photos of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, posters of Carnegie Hall concerts, framed flyers from union rallies where Pete or Woody or the Weavers were singing, and pictures of Lee Hays, Freddy Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert, the other members of the Weavers. Of course I was nervous as a cat, and hoped yet another manager would not turn me down.

  Harold was a stocky, bespectacled man with a cigar that was, I would learn, always clenched between his teeth. He was forty-two when we first met, and his hair was already thinning. His checkered suit was slightly rumpled, and as he waved his cigar across the table, aiming for the ashtray and missing, his mouth turned up in a wonderful smile.

  Harold told me that he had been a song plugger for Irving Berlin and had left the family lingerie business to manage Pete Seeger and the Weavers. He was one of the most down-to-earth people I ever knew, with a gentle, low-key sense of humor. He was managing Alan Arkin, Theo Bikel, and a few other artists at the time we met. People spoke highly of him, and he of them, he might have said. He was already producing many of the major acts in the musical world, including Jacques Brel, the great French singer/songwriter, and Nana Mouskouri, the Greek singing star.

  “You’re just a kid, aren’t you?” Harold said. I smiled at that, thinking that I was just a kid. I had a child and a husband and a career, but I was twenty-two and it seemed I had just stepped out of my high school graduating class. Harold put me immediately at ease.

  “I can work with a kid,” he said. “A kid is a good thing. You probably don’t have too many bad habits I’m going to have to change!”

  As we left his office, I noticed a figure stretched out behind the couch in the outer room, a man who was snoring softly.

  “Don’t mind him, he’s sleeping,” Harold said. The figure had a banjo by his side and was lying prone on the floor. He had a handsome, clean-shaven face and was dressed in a checkered shirt, long pants, and the kind of boots a logger might wear. He wore no watch and no coat. His face, turned to the side in repose, seemed to be smiling up at me.

  “That’s Pete,” Harold said. I had no doubt who this was, even though it was the first time I had seen the great Seeger in person, the man who had written “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” I knew he had been called in 1955 to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting engine that had ruined careers in theater, film, music, and politics. I knew he was riding out the storm after having refused to name names; he’d been blacklisted but was still singing, making records, writing songs, speaking out, appearing at union gatherings, and generally doing what he always has done—making a difference. Even with him stretched out on the floor, I felt his force and was awed by his presence.

  “Shhhhhh, let’s not wake him,” Harold said, stepping around the sleeping troubadour. “He has to rest up. He has three concerts tomorrow, each in a different city, and I have to get him to all of them and then home again.” He took his cigar out of his mouth and tapped it in an ashtray shaped like a banjo as we headed for the door.

  “I hope you aren’t going to do things like this to me. I can only take one Pete Seeger,” he added. I promised I wouldn’t, and knew Harold had just agreed to be my manager.

  Harold started negotiating my contracts with Jac and Elektra, as well as helping me to plan the concerts in New York. He took over my work life and my benefit life—there were many benefits for good causes. Marjorie Guthrie, Woody’s wife, was at Harold’s often, working on Woody’s archives and history now that he was so ill. Harold’s wife, Natalie, spent as much time there as he did. Every time I called that office—Judson 6-6553—over the next forty-five years, either Harold or Natalie, or often Marjorie Guthrie, would answer the phone.

  I met extraordinary people through Harold: Millard Lampell, who wrote songs with Woody and Pete and was one of the original members of the Almanac Singers; Lee Hays of the Weavers; and Pete Seeger, either asleep behind the couch or leaning over from his height to listen to the much shorter Harold, or maybe just ducking to avoid the smoke from Harold’s cigar.

  Harold would guide my car
eer from 1961 to 1972. He booked my dates in clubs; he got another of his clients, Theo Bikel, to include me in his Carnegie Hall concert in 1962; he booked my first solo show at Town Hall in 1964, which Elektra recorded for release later that year; and he took care of my recordings. Harold was a mensch, as the saying goes in Yiddish, and he was a workaholic.

  I adored Harold. With his gruff manner and ever-present cigar, he always made me feel safe. He was quite tender, actually, and he always knew how to be comforting. I felt that he believed in me.

  “How is it going?” he would ask. And even after I left him in 1972 to try to find a way to be more actively involved in my own career, he would still say, “How’s business?”

  In his later years, after Harold had his arthritic knuckles replaced with titanium, he joked, “Now I could smoke my cigars down to the very end—that is, if I hadn’t been forced to quit smoking because of my arthritis!”

  BY the end of November I had been working at a club called the Buddhi in Oklahoma City for a week with Bud and Travis, an easygoing duo from San Francisco who sang “They Call the Wind Mariah,” “La Bamba,” and “The Sloop John B.” As cold weather moved in, Bud and Travis headed back to California. In the meantime, Dave Van Ronk arrived in Oklahoma City on the back of one of the biggest storms ever to blanket the Midwest.

  I had heard Van Ronk sing at the Gaslight almost as soon as I got to New York the previous spring. He had rumpled hair, muttonchops for sideburns, and a mustache drooping over his lips. He wore thick black-framed glasses, his hair flopped over his forehead, and he was dressed in an army jacket, pilot’s trousers, and a pair of engineer’s boots. Hunched over his guitar like a mother over her baby, he told stories in a gravelly voice. Then he sang a song called “Hesitation Blues,” his guitar sounding like a cross between Mississippi John Hurt and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, but mostly sounding like Van Ronk. “How long do I have to wait?” he sang.