During this time, she drank increasingly, until it began to affect her career, something she's since conquered. She experimented sexually, was involved in therapy for years, and eventually came to the forefront of the women's movement. She began to write her own material during the `sixties, but she was mainly known then, as now, as an interpreter of other songwriters' music.īut there's much more here than simply her life in music - or rather the manner in which the music exposed her to much more than the entertainment business. She chronicles her ailments: polio, and a growing depression that resulted in an early attempt at suicide.īut mostly the book is about her life within the music business of the `sixties and `seventies, her evolution as a folk singer, which eventually expanded to include show tunes and various strains of pop music of that era.

And in between she tells us of her youth in Colorado, her family, including her talented, blind father, and her attraction to folk music. This book begins and ends with Stephen Stills, one of Collins' lovers during the `sixties certainly a tryst that remains most vivid in her mind. Sweet Judy Blue Eyes invites the reader into the parties that peppered Laurel Canyon and into the recording studio so we see how cuts evolved take after take, while it sets an array of amazing musical talent against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent decades of twentieth-century America.īeautifully written, richly textured, and sharply insightful, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes is an unforgettable chronicle of the folk renaissance in America. In it, she talks about her alcoholism, her lasting love affair with Stephen Stills, her friendships with Joan Baez, Richard and Mimi Fariña, David Crosby, and Leonard Cohen and, above all, the music that helped define a decade and a generation’s sound track.

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes is the deeply personal, honest, and revealing memoir of folk legend and relentlessly creative spirit Judy Collins. A vivid, highly evocative memoir of one of the reigning icons of folk music, highlighting the decade of the ’60s, when hits like “Both Sides Now” catapulted her to international fame.

Judy blue eye