Musician Judy Collins Is Restaging an Iconic Performance

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What made you want to do this and reprise where you took off?

JUDY COLLINS, MUSICIAN: Well, I, first of all, want to thank you for all the work that you do, and how inspiring you always are. And I have been inspired by you and by the times, of course, and what’s going on. But I’m curious. I was born with curiosity and also optimism, both of which I think are necessary in these days, but they have always driven me. And I have always been a performer. I have always been singing, performing. And in the pandemic, I have actually done a lot of writing. I have a bunch of new things that are coming out soon. But being at Town Hall again, which was a theater, as you know, in New York which was founded by and opened by the suffragettes and at which I have sung many times, and at which my teacher Antonia Brico conducted her own orchestra of women in 1937, so it’s been a long time at Town Hall.

AMANPOUR: Well, it’s an amazing pedigree. I hadn’t actually realized — I’m glad you told us about the suffragettes and the female-led productions there. It’s great and clearly wonderful that you’re doing that. Can I just ask you? Because, I mean, am I right that you sound better than ever or certainly as good as ever? And I want to know what you put that down to, because not everybody at 81 has that clear pitch and those — that fantastic strength and purity of voice that you still have. And you even had an operation, I think, on a polyp or node on your vocal cords.

COLLINS: I did. Christiane, I did have a surgery for a hemangioma on my vocal cord, well, 44 years ago, it is now. I got lucky, because, in the beginning, when everybody else was running down to Max’s Kansas City and going to — we were all going to fund-raisers and marching, I also knew that I was losing my voice. This was in 1965. And losing your voice in those days was not so unpopular. A lot of people lost their voices and continued to sing. And a lot of people weren’t worried about it. But I was terrified of it, because, as a classically trained musician, and as the person whose heroes were people, a lot of people who were musicians who played until they fell over, conductors and violinist and pianists, and so I knew that I had to keep it, because I knew that that’s what I had going, was the voice.