Trust Your Heart

The first time I heard Judy Collin's stirring voice was over the radio when her super hit "Both Sides Now" became an international crossover hit on the popular charts in 1968. Of course, at that point her career was really taking off, and by the time I was finishing my senior year the next summer, I had all of her albums and played them all into a scratchy oblivion. A good friend of mine had a super sound system, and he was so enamored of her "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?" he played it over and over again. Her voice and arrangements had such an intoxicating effect that one was drawn into the colorful dreamscapes she created with her autobiographical approach in many of the songs. Magically, Ms. Collins has achieved the same sort of infectious hospitality in creating the same kind of watercolor representation of her remarkable and very purposeful personal life. This is an autobiography that not only tells all, but also does so in a way that places her actions in context, so one better understands how the aspects of her personal, professional, and civil life all merged and interacted. Judy appears to have considerable gifts as an author, which is no surprise to those of us familiar with her amazing prowess as a songwriter and lyricist. Her songs are quite literate and poetic, and the rhyme schemes and use of the language betray a native facility with expressing herself. Here too she often paints word pictures of real life situations and circumstances. I remember listening to her song "Martin" as I was about to leave the safety of graduate study for my first professional position, and recall her phrase "my life was moving fast by now" as describing not just her existential circumstances, but for most baby-boomers really grabbing life by the horns at long last. Judy's career is legendary, starting off slowly as Judy hit the cafes and coffee houses in Fort Collins, Colorado while her husband finished his graduate studies at the local university. She gradually became quite adept at supporting them and their son Clark by increasingly drawing crowds and spreading her range of songs and venues for her soaring voice and intricate ability with an acoustic guitar. Yet even as she became more successful with her career, her marriage floundered. Soon, the career, which was taking wings and flying off on its own power, began to seductively call her toward distant gigs and national causes, such as civil rights and the growing protest against the war in Vietnam. Once fame and success came her way, she quickly flowered into a virtual cottage industry of her own, propelled by a memorable succession of best-selling albums and sell-out tours, so that as her career began to peak in the early 1970s, Judy was looking to stretch her artistic wings and try for other ways to express herself. She appeared in several Broadway shows, and experimented with more traditional song forms and styles. Doing so gradually affected her audience, which seemed to want much more of the