Judy Collins’s music conjures up different images.
Judy was his inspiration, his muse, the older woman who broke his heart. How could I not read Judy Collins’s memoir Sweet Judy Blue Eyes? Stephen Stills vividly captured the passion and pain of their love affair in his joyful, yet plaintive epic song. Each time I hear this song, I feel I missed the best part of a generation.
It is "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", first performed by Crosby, Stills and Nash on Augat Yasgur’s farm, two weeks before I was born. It never fails to transport me to a time beyond my memory, a place that now fades into American mythology: California, late 1960's. It has always been one of my favorite songs. The sweet chords in E pour forth from Stephen Stills's guitar, sounding like early morning California sunshine feels: warm and flirtatious, dancing on an ocean breeze as it kisses you awake. This is what we call the “folk process,” borrowing to fit the time, the person, the incident.Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music by Judy Collins One person would add a verse another would change a melody a bit. These songs survive in the memory of a culture because they tell stories of universal emotion and experience-of love, heartbreak, mourning, abandonment, victory, and defeat-and because they are so very adaptable to so many times, to so many people. Somebody somewhere came up with a melody through which to tell a story, and that story-song got passed along.
Traditional songs didn’t just spring from the earth, of course. You also will have added something to the story of humankind. They touch your heart, and for anyone trying to write new and original songs, they stand as an unspoken challenge: make something as good and as timeless as this and you will have won the heart of your listener. “Danny Boy,” “The Lark in the Morning,” “Barbara Allen,” “So Early, Early in the Spring,” and “The Gypsy Rover” have lasted for years and will endure for years more. I keep returning to these old, classic songs, often bringing them back to find new meaning and fresh interpretations. “Traditional music is the foundation of what the folk music revival was about-songs of unknown authorship handed down through the generations.
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