Including Reviews of two of Judy’s Books:
Sanity and Grace: A Journey of Suicide, Survival, and Strength
and
The Seven T’s: Finding Hope and Healing in the Wake of Tragedy
Judy,
I love it that your vocal gifts and training in classical piano never require you to reach for notes—I’ve never heard you reach once—but to hit them dead center. Your voice performs like a finely-tuned instrument: on pitch, on key. You can hit these notes in a whisper or a full Ethel Merman bravura, as you did in the song that launched your career, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now.” I will always be gobstruck by your largely a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace,” especially as you have your audiences join in at the end your performances.
As I began to examine your taste in selecting songs to “cover,” my respect for you grew. Perhaps the most successful of your covers was Grammy-winning cover of Steven Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” Another favorite of mine was your cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” which allowed me to see past his voice to his well-crafted lyrics and music. I loved the tension he creates by his opening line: “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez when it’s Easter time, too.”
Sondheim and Dylan (and others’ songs you’ve sung, as diverse as Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra) were household names before you recorded their songs. But you’ve also made remarkable “discoveries,” covering songs by singer-songwriters long before they gained audiences, with names such as Eric Andersen, Fred Neil, Ian Tyson, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Robin Williamson and Richard Fariña. Your most-admired discovery may have been the late Leonard Cohen—in “The Globe and Mail, Canada,” November 11, 2016, your article helped me understand how you launched Cohen:
“And then he played me ‘Suzanne’ . . . I said, ‘Leonard, you must come with me to this big fundraiser I’m doing’. . . Jimi Hendrix was on it. [Leonard had] never sung in front of a large audience before then. He got out on stage and started singing. Everybody was going crazy—they loved it. And he stopped about halfway through and walked off the stage. Everybody went nuts. . . they demanded that he come back. And I demanded; I said, ‘I’ll go out with you.’ So we went out, and we sang it. And of course, that was the beginning . . .”
And you have been such a champion of Stephen Sondheim—whose work I’d been introduced to by my musical-theater-composer son, who followed Sondheim into composing for musical theater. Your CD and DVD tributes to Sondheim brought my regard for you up yet another notch higher. I was glad to learn that the concert is available to Amazon Prime members for free, although by then I’d already bought four DVDs for friends. I also started becoming a regular when you came to the San Francisco Bay Area, and have enjoyed how you show a little of your personal side in your performances, such as recounting how Steven Sondheim thanked you for his only hit. You were spot-on with your notes on Sondheim:
“I have loved the songs and the shows of Stephen Sondheim since recording “Send in the Clowns” in my album Judith in 1974. My version of the great Sondheim ballad has garnered a Grammy, the top ten slot in Billboard twice in a decade, and is still played on the radio all over the world. Ever since the success of “Send in the Clowns” I have longed to sing the rest of Sondheim’s greatest songs. Now, I have the opportunity do to that. These songs glow with familiarity and inhabit the rooms and vistas of all our lives, scenes and melodies from “Little Night Music,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Sundays in the Park with George,” “Company,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Into the Woods.” I pray to do justice to these great songs, and to their composer, one of our National Treasures, Stephen Sondheim.”
In an interview, you said something like, to sing any of these covers, you ultimately must “make it into a Judy Collins song.” I’m glad you do. The way you work Sondheim’s brilliance into “You Are Not Alone,” is magnificent: “Just remember/ Someone is on your side/ Someone else is not/ Well we’re seeing our side/ Maybe we forgot/ They are not alone/ No one is alone.” That’s not precisely how he had it in Into the Woods, but close enough that I’m sure he’d never complain.
It was when, in your late seventies, you gave that Denver performance of A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim, without breaks or mistakes that I became a true fanboy. Many septuagenarians have a hard time going on for two minutes without a Malapropism or a mangled sentence. Meanwhile I’d learned that your son had committed suicide, possibly the worst thing that can happen to a parent. Even though that had happened a decade earlier, the way you successfully worked through that tragedy made me even more in awe of your ability to hold a spotlight without error for an hour. I realized that you are someone from whom I might learn. Before I react to the two books you wrote by studying suicide and helping others through it, I’d like to thank you for attempting suicide when you were fourteen, because living through that self-destructive act obviously gave you levels of empathy that could be gained no other way.
In Sanity and Grace, you described how your blind father had pushed you so hard in your piano studies. When he gave you an assignment to learn a complex piano piece—La Campenella by Franz Liszt— for a show he was doing a month later, you became increasingly depressed. You realized you couldn’t master it in that time, so you made your own suicide seem reasonable:
“Suddenly that day, out of the blue, as they say, I thought about suicide, not as the plot in a novel and not as the solution taken by a stranger, but as the only way out. I thought about my death. It would be easy. I would take a bottle of aspirin; that would do it.”
Later in the book, when you quoted Freud about how suicide can be a misplaced homicide, you conceded you may have wanted to kill your father. Another take-away from the event, one you didn’t write about, was that it was a performance you were hesitant to present, a place Judy Collins couldn’t fail.
Thank God that dozens of aspirin made you throw up. What we all would have missed! Here are my reviews of your two suicide books that should be seen by as many people facing suicide and suicide-recoverees as possible:
A Brief Review of Sanity and Grace by Judy Collins
Collins’ convincing attempts to normalize suicide in this memoir put her in conflict with traditional thoughts about suicide, particularly from organized religions. Collins criticizes Jews, Muslims, Evangelical Christians, and Catholics for demonizing what Collins views as a very human act. Here’s the Catholic version:
“After the death of my son, a woman whose father had been a Catholic shared with me that when her father had taken his own life, the priest told her mother that her husband could be buried in the cemetery, but he could not be borne in the hearse through the entrance in the customary manner; instead, he would have to be carried in his casket over the closed gates.”
When, later in Sanity and Grace, Judy finds a silver lining to her son’s death, I gained insight into what drives Judy, now in her eighties, to continually perform:
“My son’s gift to me, I would find, would be myself. Myself grieving, myself lifting the weights of life, the heavy burdens that come with getting up out of bed when you want to lie down and die with your lost loved one—the weights that make us search for music, for poetry, for our own creativity, to find our way . . .
I went out on the road, fighting to work, to survive, singing in all the places that I sing, traveling and trying to bring pleasure to myself and other people with my music. I felt the work was healing me. I knew the strength that was in the songs I sang, and the words I wrote.”
But suicide, like divorce, is a gift that keeps on giving. By sharing her own hard-earned lessons in the start and stop of self-forgiveness, she gives others hope:
“I want to scream and shout and cry and throw things, but I don’t. I have done that already, made my peace with Clark’s choice.
“Or so I think, from time to time. Until the arrow lodges in my heart again. Until the next dream in which he comes to me so powerfully, as though he were in the room with me. Until I see a mother with a little boy, redheaded, walking in a park or a mall or an airport, see her bend down to wipe his nose or straighten his little jacket. Then my heart breaks, again and again. How many times can your heart break? Forever, your heart can break forever. Letting in the sorrow, and letting out the rage. Break, my heart, till all the tears are gone. Break, my heart, till all the hope is restored. Break, till all the days that he is not here are over; break until he returns.”
Judy is effective in bring statistics alive as she recounts the specifics of the astounding numbers of suicides and attempted suicides:
“According to many recent statistics I have read about suicide, there are approximately 600,000 people who try to take their own lives in this country each year. And according to Sharon Rose Blauner, whose book, How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me, came out in 2002, the figure is even higher—750,000. The Los Angeles Times, in a May 2002 article about suicide, says that most of the self-inflicted wounds of people who find their way to emergency rooms are the result of failed suicide attempts. If hundreds of thousands of people in America try to kill themselves every year, as the statistics tell us, then since the publication of Alvarez’s book, 18 million Americans can also call themselves failed suicides.”
A Brief Review of The Seven T’s:
Finding Hope and Healing in the Wake of Tragedy
After Judy Collins published Sanity and Grace, she was asked to speak at many recovery events. She learned to net out her recommendations to those who sought healing. Her seven T’s are wonderfully crisp and helpful. She avoids platitudes by recounting the concise wisdom she earned by what she’d lived through—she ‘makes it real.’
Judy’s seven T’s are:
- Truth—Regardless of how terrible the facts may be and how hard it is to talk about it, Judy is absolutely against hiding the truth about how you lost the person you loved. The only exception she makes is if the truth will hurt others.
- Trust—This builds on #1—making sure you tell the truth not only to yourself and the public, but specifically to your friends. If they cannot support you, find people who can.
- Therapy—Judy encourages people to seek help, be it through traditional talk therapy, art, and/ or meditation—whatever method or combination of those methods—but get the help you need.
- Treasure—Judy doesn’t want to let the horrible events leading to his or her death wash away all the things that were good and beautiful about that person’s life.
- Treat—with Temperance and Tenacity—Judy implores people under this kind of pressure to take care of their bodies and minds with exercise and other relaxation-producing activities. She points out that a healthy physical life can alter chemical imbalances.
- Thrive—Judy wants people to keep living with their eyes wide open, to resist the temptations of alcohol or other addictive substances to blunt or blur their sadness.
- Transcend—Judy wants people to a life of joy, abundance, and forgiveness.
Judy Collins’ Lyrics
Lastly, Judy, I am so enamored of your songwriting. One of your songs seemed almost comically trivial when I first heard it—worrying about Snow Angels getting home before they melt, conflating that with a lover turning into a mere friend with the dawn. I know you’d written a good song called Sanity and Grace, but that song has never resonated for me—you may have needed prose to tackle suicide, which you did so well in your articles. Little-known “Angels in the Snow” is my favorite Judy Collins song, a rich metaphor for the challenges we all face and how redemption will happen through love. Like the surety of Sondheim’s “You are not Alone,” you find no solace in questioning outcomes. You divulge your faith—another aspect of you I love—by stating unequivocally that “Angels will (not might, not try to) find their way home again.”
Angels in the Snow
by Judy Collins & Jonas Fjeld
Angels in the snow have their own song
A song in the dark of night to fight the coming of the dawn
Safe in the shadows from the cold and rain
I was a stranger till you opened up and let me in
Caught in the wild angels in the wind
Silhouettes harmonize as the darkness takes them in
The song has no words,
Just a sweet surprise,
Hearts that can hear it know
The only chains are to the skies
So hold me—stay with me and know me
Hold me till the morning is
Chaining a lover for a friend
So let me be a part of you now
Hear your body singing
Till heaven is breaking apart
Angels will find their way home again
(guitar interlude)
Angels draw their wings in the snow
Hiding for a while
Before they fly where they must go
Angels they seek the dark and silent night
Running from the dawn and the coming of the light
Footsteps and shadows slowly passing by
What can they see when the evening light is in their eye
Angels are in the snow—there’s no escape
They know when springtime comes
They’ll disappear without a trace
So hold me
Stay with me and know me
Hold me till the morning is chaining
A lover for a friend
And let me be a part of you now
Hear your body singing till heaven is breaking apart
Angels will find their way home again
They must find their way back home again
Angels will find their way home again
They must find their way back home again
Angels Angels
Angels will find their way home again
Angels
By the way, do I have the word ‘chaining’ correct? I couldn’t find this song’s lyrics anywhere, so I transposed them myself. I expected you to sing ‘changing,” but this fits.
Here’s a picture of us at a “Meet and Greet” at Yoshi’s:
I’m honored to be on the same planet with you at the same time. I’m set now—by uploading key CDs, I’ve taught “Alexa” to pull up most of your songs, and have tickets to see five of your concerts this year. May that continue for many years.
Love,
Kevin
