Seattle-born Judy Collins kicks off her “farewell tour” on PBS’ semiquincentennial special “America Made in Virginia: 250 Years Together” (7 p.m. Saturday, KCTS-TV), a telecast from Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg that mixes live performance with historical interpretation and fireworks.
Collins, 87, traces her roots back to Seattle, where she was born. She credits her radio broadcaster father with helping to set her on her career path.
“My father was a great entertainer,” Collins says during a recent Zoom interview. “He had a 30-year career in the radio business, and he started in Seattle in 1937, and he met my mother, and then I was born in ‘39. I was surrounded by music all the time. He was a very, very popular radio personality in Seattle, and then in Los Angeles, and then in Denver. He had a really good run.”
Judy’s father, Chuck Collins, hosted “Chuck Collins Calling,” a morning radio show on KOMO-AM. Even after the family left the Pacific Northwest, Collins returned to Seattle regularly to visit both sets of grandparents and other relatives, including her aunt Jeanette, who lived to be 100.
For “America Made in Virginia,” Collins will likely sing a few songs, including “Beyond the Sky,” a song NASA commissioned her to write for astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a space shuttle mission in 1999. (They are not related.)
Creating her own songs — rather than reinterpreting the works of others — wasn’t something Judy Collins did from the start. It was around the time Collins recorded Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” in 1966 that Cohen said to her, “I don’t know why you aren’t writing your own songs.”
“And I went to the piano in the next room, and I wrote a song called ‘Since You’ve Asked,’ which is the first song that I wrote, and I’ve never stopped writing songs,” Collins says.
Collins notes it wasn’t the first time she’d been asked the question, but it was how Cohen asked it.
“(Bob) Dylan would say to me, ‘Why don’t you write your own songs, (instead of singing) mine?’ And that’s just rude, you know?” Collins says. “With Leonard … it’s the way he said the question.”
When it comes to performing songs written by others, Collins’ goal is to make it her own.
“Frank Sinatra didn’t write any of his songs, but he made them his own, and I did the same thing,” she says. “It wasn’t Frank Sinatra who had the hit with ‘Send in the Clowns’; it was me.”
How she reinterprets songs to make them her own is something she chalks up to an innate sense.
“It’s from the cradle,” Collins says. “I think that I heard my father singing ‘Danny Boy’ when I was in the womb. … It’s your song when you have heard it and you learn it, and you sing it wherever you are. My father was a great interpreter. He was a great performer. He chose the right songs, and that’s what I seem to have inherited. I know which ones are for me.”
In addition to her performance on the PBS special, Collins has tour dates scheduled into next year, including two stops in Washington this fall in Port Angeles on Sept. 29 and Kirkland on Sept. 30.
“I mix the show up,” Collins says. “I always try to make it different so I’m not singing the same things every night.”
But her biggest hits like “Both Sides Now,” “Send in the Clowns” and “Amazing Grace” almost always make the cut.
“And I’ll always try to get the audience to sing,” Collins adds. “I’m pretty sure that an audience in Seattle, and in the environs of Seattle, Wash., will sing. People have learned to sing in the choruses, in the churches, in the choirs. … It’s a great reliever of tension. If you can get an audience to sing ‘Danny Boy,’ you’re in good position.”
As far as this tour’s billing as a “farewell tour,” Collins suggests taking that with a grain of salt.
“You remember all of the groups that have done ‘farewell tours,’ which lasted a number of years? I can name 20,” Collins says with a grin. “I will always be performing as long as I’m alive.”
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