Judy Collins Revives Her Historic 1964 Concert at Age 81

In my eight years of knowing Judy Collins, I've been struck by her generosity, kindness and unstoppable work ethic — at 81, after 55 albums, she still tours the world for a third of each year, her calm, plaintive, bell-pure soprano seemingly unaged. Her world tour starts in April, and on Feb. 12, she recreates her historic 1964 show at New York's Town Hall with a benefit concert for MultiFaith Alliance, which helps Syrian refugees (you can stream it here).

Collins’ rugged road

Collins has accomplished all of this while battling serious demons. She suffered a deep depression while growing up as the oldest of five children (her father was an inspiring, can-do blind pianist and radio personality). She attempted suicide at 14; developed a drinking habit stanched by 43 years in the recovery community; experienced eating disorders (discussed in her 2003 memoir Cravings); and mourned the 1992 suicide of her only son, Clark (discussed in her 2017 book Sanity and Grace). Collins is life-weathered.

A life-changing concert

When she did her life-changing 1964 Town Hall concert, she was 24, just divorced, with big troubles. “I had just spent five months in the hospital with tuberculosis and I was dangling,” she says, “trying to pick up the pieces of my career. Clark had been snatched up by his father.” Her ex-husband, an English professor she'd followed from college town to college town for years, got custody of their boy. “He was 4. He said, ‘Why can't I be with you?’ My lawyers said, ‘You can't lose custody! A woman never does.’ It was a troubled, very emotionally mixed time, for me as a single mother.” After years of heartache and struggle — “It felt like forever!” — she won custody of Clark in 1967.

But when she chose her Town Hall set list, it was the nation's traumas that preoccupied her: the Vietnam War, the killing of President John F. Kennedy, for whom she'd sung at a “Dinner With the President” event in January 1963, and the bloody battle for Black voting rights, which Collins supported by singing and speaking out. “I definitely knew I wanted to sing ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,’ a great Dylan song about the murder of a Black waitress at a Baltimore hotel [by an elite racist]; ‘The Battle of Medgar Evers’ [the slain civil rights leader]; and ‘Hey, Nellie, Nellie,’ about Lincoln and racism over the centuries.”

She sang tunes including “Coal Tattoo,” by the West Virginia mining-town runaway Billy Edd Wheeler; Tom Paxton's “The Last Thing on My Mind,” “Bottle of Wine” and “Ramblin’ Boy"; and the stirring English folk ballad “The Cruel Mother,” about 17th-century prejudice against “illegitimate” children.