Judy Collins Biography: In Her Own Words – Exclusive Video, News, Photos, Age

Judy Collins is an American singer/songwriter and musician with an impressive career spanning over seven decades. She is known primarily for her eclectic taste in music, her social activism and the unique clarity of her voice.

JUDY COLLINS BIOGRAPHY: AGE, EARLY LIFE, FAMILY, EDUCATION

Judy Collins was born on May 1, 1939 (Judy Collins’s age: 84) in Seattle, Washington, where she was raised for the first ten years of her life. When her father, who was a blind singer, pianist, and record show host, landed a job in Denver, Colorado in 1949, he brought the entire family along for the ride.

Collins began playing the piano at the age of five, made her public debut at thirteen years old with Denver Symphony and began playing the guitar and singing folk music while enrolled in Denver East High School as a young teenager. She studied classical music with her instructor, Antonia Brico, and attended the University of Colorado Boulder and MacMurray College.

JUDY COLLINS BIOGRAPHY: CAREER

Collins experienced the greatest success of her career with the recording of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” from her tenth studio album Judith in 1975. The hit single peaked at number thirty-six on the Billboard Pop Singles chart that year, and then again in 1977, this time even higher at nineteen. Judith would go on to become Collins’s number one best-selling album, earning her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, as well as a Grammy Award for Sondheim for Song of the Year. It was certified Gold by the RIAA in 1975 for sales exceeding 500,000 copies and Platinum in 1996 for sales exceeding 1,000,000 copies.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview, Collins spoke about her experiences as a young girl that made her decide to become a singer.

“Well, I was raised with a singer and my father was a great singer,” Collins reflected. “And so as a little girl, I was always trying to learn the songs that he was singing, all the Rodgers and Hart, Rogers and Hammerstein, plus the Christmas songs, plus ‘Danny Boy.’ He had a big, big repertoire and I always wanted to sing everything. The first time he had me come on stage with him was when I was three and it was in Butte, Montana. He was touring for National School assemblies, which was established by Roosevelt as part of the attempt to get music back into the world. And so he said to me, ‘do you want to sing something on the show in the intermission,’ and I said ‘sure, I’d love to’. I loved an audience. I was a ham right from the start and so I sang ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas,’ and, of course, it was a big hit. It was also April, but from that time on I was performing either in public, or for my teachers, or my school shows and on my father’s radio show. He used to get me on to sing ‘The Sunny Side of the Street’ and then I would play some handle, or some Mozart or some Bach also. So, the combination of The Great American Songbook and the great classical composers was a very good place for me to spend my youth before I hit the great folk scare, as one of my brothers calls it.”

Collins also spoke about the popularity she gained from her sixth studio album Wildflowers, the album that granted her international recognition.

“The one thing that happened was that people started answering my phone calls. I was always calling people about one thing or another. I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that. I wanted to call so and so about the song that I’d just wrote and that I’d heard. I was always very active. You know, you have to remember if you’re an artist, whether you’re a painter, or a singer, or a poet or whatever you might be in the arts, you must be willing to become a salesperson as well. After all, that’s what you’re doing really. You’re going out on concert. Now, we bring all of our gears with us. We have t-shirts. We have CD’s. Now we have vinyl’s again, which is just amazing. I just signed about, I don’t know, 200 vinyl’s of the album that we’re talking about from the concert that I did at Town Hall in a pandemic. A virtual concert, no audience, and they made a vinyl about it.”

JUDY COLLINS BIOGRAPHY: TB, PERSONAL LIFE, ‘CHE’

In 1962, shortly after she made her debut in Carnegie Hall, Collins was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent six months recovering in a sanitorium. 

Collins has been married twice, once in 1958 to Peter Taylor, with whom she gave birth to her only child, and then again in 1996 to American industrial designer and graphic artist Louis Nelson, whom she had reportedly been seeing since April 1978. Nelson and Collins are still married today and living together in New York City.

Collins suffered from bulimia just after she quit smoking in the 1970s. She has also discussed her long struggle with alcohol addiction at length, detailing the massive harm it’s caused to her personal and musical life, as well as its role in worsening her feelings of depression. In 1978, she entered a rehabilitation program in Pennsylvania, where she has impressively maintained her sobriety ever since, even through the traumatic events she’s faced in her life, such as the tragic death of her only son, who committed suicide at the age of thirty-three after a long fought battle with clinical depression and substance abuse. Since then, Collins has also become an activist for suicide prevention.

Similar to numerous folk singers from her era, Collins found herself drawn to social activism. Her political idealism had even led her to produce a ballad entitled “Che” in honor of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.