The room was filled with a noisy crowd, half of them a little drunk. “I was with my guitar case, my hair cut short in a pixie. At Michael’s, you could sometimes hear a barbershop quartet or one of the pop acts from Denver, but never a folk singer. “By the time I was discovered to be a folk singer, I already had a trail of Mozart, Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra,” she said.Īt the age of 20, the new mother and wife won an audition for a job at Michael’s Pub, a Boulder hangout where all the college students went to eat pizza and guzzle gallons of “horse-piss,” which is what they called the 3.2 percent beer you had to drink in Colorado if you were under 21. She started her singing career in the late 1950s, performing folk songs at clubs in Denver and various mountain bistros.Įven at the age of 19, Collins had gained her social conscience and the special gift of turning folk songs into art songs. But I really got interested through Lingo the Drifter,” an enigmatic Lookout Mountain resident who taught her the songs of Woody Guthrie and Josh White.
“I’d never heard of folk music until listening to Jo Stafford and the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte sing it on the radio in ’57. She debuted with the Denver Businessmen’s Orchestra when she was just a teenager.īy the time she was a Denver East High School student, Collins had traded the classical piano for a second-hand guitar, a gift from her father. Collins’ father was a singer, composer and broadcasting personality in Denver during the golden days of radio, and she appeared as a youngster on his KOA radio program, Chuck Collins Calling. Antonia Brico, a woman teacher and conductor who had studied with the legendary Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and had visited celebrated Austrian musician and physician Albert Schweitzer every summer.
At the age of ten, she began the study of classical piano with Dr. Her early years in music gave her a taste for variety. In 1949, her family moved from Seattle to Denver, where her discovery of folk music at age 15 set her on a path that brought international fame. Inextricably linked to the rise in the populist song movement that first swept the music scene during the 1960s, Judy Collins claims Colorado as her home state.
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