Steeped in the work of Jo Stafford and Elton Hayes, later songs by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Collins was a natural troubadour of traditional ballads like “The Gypsy Rover” and “Maid of Constant Sorrow” and gradually made a name for herself on the circuit, like the Gate of Horn in Chicago and Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village she secured a long-running record deal with Elektra by 1961, when she was 22. Collins was there, rather accidentally: she was a classical pianist who had largely grown up in Denver, Colo., to a blind, hard-drinking father who read Dylan Thomas in Braille and hosted a radio literary program she was married and with a young child when her husband suggested that she get a job at Michael’s Pub in Boulder singing the folk songs she loved. The turmoil would inspire the atmosphere that surrounded the group’s follow-up with Neil Young, Déjà Vu, which was noticeably darker in tone than Crosby, Stills, and Nash.Ĭheck out ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ down below.Collins’s improbable and utterly charming tale of assuming iconic status as a popular music star from the early 1960s’ onward also proves a tremendously valuable chronicle of the early folk music scene. Graham Nash had split with Joni Mitchell, while David Crosby had lost his longtime girlfriend, Christine Hinton, in a car accident. They weren’t alone either: around the same time, Stills’ bandmates in CSN were going through their own romantic troubles. We were feeling like, ‘Whoa, what happened?'”īy 1969, Collins and Stills had officially ended their relationship. Neither one of us walked away from that relationship relieved. Most of all, I felt the song was flattering and heartbreaking – for both of us. “I’ve always understood that people have to write about their lives.

But it’s not winning me back,'” Collins added in 2017. “Afterwards, we both cried – and then I said: ‘Oh, Stephen, it’s such a beautiful song.

So the legacy of our relationship is certainly in that song.” And so he wove that all together in this magnificent creation. “And, of course, it has lines in it that referred to my therapy. “ came to where I was singing one night on the West Coast and brought his guitar to the hotel, and he sang me ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, the whole song,” Collins recalled in 2000.

Judy collins eyes