By
Richie Unterberger
For the
first half-dozen albums of her career, Judy Collins sang only
traditional folk tunes and material by other songwriters. Even when she
began to write songs in the late 1960s, her compositions were
outnumbered by tunes from other sources on the records she issued
during the next five years or so. The 1973 LP True Stories and Other Dreams,
however, marked the first album on which her own songs comprised the
majority of the material. As usual, though, the record also featured
astutely selected tunes from a variety of other contemporary
singer-songwriters, some of whom had also been recording since the
early days of the folk revival, and some of whom were newcomers to the
music scene.
True Stories and Other Dreams also
marked the first occasion on which she received a producer's credit,
shared with Mark Abramson, who'd produced her recordings since the
mid-1960s. As Judy elaborates, however, throughout their association,
"we produced together, truly. I would never have denied him his
production credit. But it was also my choices, my thinking, my
determination, and then Mark backing me up, helping me get what I
wanted to get done. And we knew all these wonderful people, of course."
On True Stories and Other Dreams,
that support cast included her longtime friend Eric Weissberg on
acoustic guitar, banjo, and upright bass; Bill Keith, whose pedal steel
lent an occasional country flavor; and even Latin jazzman Ray Barretto
on congos and bongos.
The abundance of original material resulted from a
block of time that Collins had deliberately set aside to develop new
songs. As was often the case in her compositions, these often dealt
with issues inspired by direct experiences with family and friends, as
well as socially conscious political concerns. "I took a little time
off in 1972 and went out to Long Island just to do some songwriting,"
remembers Judy today. "At that point, I wrote 'Fishermen Song.' I was
on the beach there and these fishermen sing; they bring in the fish,
and they would hand me a fresh bluefish or something for me to cook. So
'Fishermen Song' is really about that experience of watching them fish."
Continues Collins, "'Secret Gardens' was of course
about my family. The first line of 'Secret Gardens,' I was working with
the poet in sort of an arts group. I was writing away in my journal,
and looking for ways to start out my songs. She said, 'Well, look
through your journal, and just take one of the sentences from your
journal and start a song with it.' So I was looking through my journal,
and my grandmother had died a couple of years before. The line in the
journal was, 'My grandmother's house is still there, but it isn't the
same.' And that was the first line, of course, of 'Secret Gardens.' I
always loved 'Secret Gardens.' I had read the book [Frances Hodgson
Burnett's children's novel Secret
Garden] as a child; I always kept that image in my mind."
Collins has often written about her family–one of
the first songs she wrote, "My Father," remains one of her most
famous—and "Holly Ann," she adds, "was about my wonderful sister
Holly." The subject of "Song for Martin" wasn't immediate family, but
was also inspired by someone close to her, Mart Hoffman, who'd recently
committed suicide. "He was the first person I ever heard sing 'This
Land Is Your Land,' up at Lookout Mountain in Colorado," says Judy. "He
was a wonderful man, just a sweet man."
In an entirely different vein, the
seven-and-a-half-minute "Ché"–inspired, of course, by the famous
revolutionary Ché Guevara–is one of the most ambitious
compositions Collins ever put on disc. She'd been thinking about "the
people who betrayed him, and how they might feel, because they were
probably Catholics, they were probably poor, they were probably
peasants in South America," she reflects. "And I thought, I want to see
if I can paint that picture of him. Because all these people get told
by leaders what they should do, and how they should live, and it must
get to be a burden."
It's a subject and song that still resonates with
her, as in 2008 "I put out an album, Born
to the Breed, with other singers singing my songs. The guy who
sang this is James Mudriczki, who's with a group called Puressence in
England. He sang this in what would be called the Manchester style,
with very, very '70s kind of rhythm. But I thought it was wonderful,
the way he did it. So you never know when somebody can do a song and
make it something entirely different."
Of the four tracks by other writers on True Stories and Other Dreams, the
most famous is Valerie Carter's "Cook with Honey," as it gave Collins a
#32 hit single in spring 1973. Judy and Valerie came into contact as
Carter was a girlfriend of a friend of Stacy Keach, the famed actor
with whom Collins was having a relationship at the time. Carter
recorded the song herself as part of her group Howdy Moon, but Judy
thinks she learned the song directly from Valerie, and not from the
Howdy Moon record. "I never heard anybody else sing it, except her, so
I doubt that I would have heard their version," she says. "So probably
I recorded it before she did. A lot of these songs that I've done over
these fifty years, I've recorded before the artist who wrote the song
recorded it. So in a way they're not covers at all. A lot of times,
they wouldn't have record deals. In the case of John Phillips, he wrote
'Me and My Uncle' and forgot he wrote it. But he sang it to me one
night, and then I recorded it, and then he said, 'Oh yeah, I did write
that!'" she laughs.
While Stephen Stills's "So Begins the Task" had been
on his 1972 album Manassas,
it had actually been written at least four years prior to that. It's
one of the songs on a recently unearthed demo tape Stills made after a
Judy Collins session, issued as an official CD in 2007 titled Just Roll Tape: April 26, 1968.
Indeed most of those songs (including of course "Suite: Judy Blue
Eyes"), says Judy, were about her, as the pair had a relationship in
the late 1960s. "We were doing [Collins's late-'60s album] Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and
we were back in the studio recording a version of 'Who Knows Where the
Time Goes,' which was gonna go into a movie called The Subject Was Roses," she
recalls. "When we finished, I had to get on a plane, and Stephen said,
'You know, I'm gonna stick around.' So he gave John Haeny, my engineer,
a hundred bucks or something, and said, 'Just roll the tape.' When it
came out, I called him up and I said, 'My god, it's like getting a
valentine forty years later.'"
Tom Paxton, like Collins, had been making albums for
more than a decade by the time of True
Stories and Other Dreams. She'd recorded three of his most
famous songs, "The Last Thing on My Mind," "Ramblin' Boy," and "Bottle
of Wine," back in 1964 for her album The
Judy Collins Concert. She didn't record any more of his material
(although she did perform his "Mr. Blue" on a 1967 television program)
for quite some time before including a recent Paxton composition on True Stories and Other Dreams.
She hails "The Hostage," written in the wake of the 1971 Attica prison
riots and featured on Paxton's 1972 album Peace Will Come, as a "great song,
one of the best songs ever written I think by anyone."
From a less celebrated source, "The Dealer (Down and
Losin')" had appeared on the first album by singer-songwriter Bob
Ruzicka. "I just love it," Collins enthuses. "A friend of mine was
working for me, hunting for material, helping me look for things, and
she found that song for me. I always like songs about gambling and
horse racing and 'when the odds are against you, don't be depressed.'"
While True
Stories and Other Dreams did pretty well commercially, making
the Top Thirty, in a way it marked the end of one era in Collins's
career. After it was released, Elektra Records founder/president Jac
Holzman called her one night to let her know he'd be leaving the label
she'd been recording for since the early 1960s. She'd continue on
Elektra, however, for another decade and quite a few more albums,
several of which have also been reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice
Music. – Richie Unterberger
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