Judy Collins

Judy Collins is an American singer-songwriter and musician whose career spans nearly seven decades. She is a Grammy Award-winning recording artist and an Academy Award-nominated documentary director. She is known for the clarity of her voice, for her social activism, and for the range of material she records, which includes folk, country, show tunes, pop, rock and roll and standards.

Born in Seattle in 1939 and raised in Denver from the age of ten, she grew up hearing the songs her father, a blind singer, pianist and radio host, sang. She studied classical piano with Antonia Brico and made her public debut at thirteen. Then the music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and the folk revival of the early 1960s drew her to guitar and to lyrics.

She made her way to Greenwich Village and signed with Elektra Records. Her debut album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, came out in 1961. Her recording of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" brought her international prominence and her first Grammy Award. Her recording of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" became the biggest success of her career. She also recorded songs by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman before those writers were widely known, and she began writing her own songs with Wildflowers in 1967.

Her recording of "Amazing Grace" was selected for the National Recording Registry in 2017. That year she also received a Grammy nomination for Silver Skies Blue, made with Ari Hest. In 2019 she had her first No. 1 album on a Billboard chart with Winter Stories, a duet album with Jonas Fjeld. Her 2022 album Spellbound was her first made entirely of original material and earned another Grammy nomination.