By
Richie Unterberger
Over
the course of three extraordinary albums in the last half of the 1960s,
Judy Collins made the journey from folk star to pop star. All of those
albums–In My Life, Wildflowers, and Who Knows Where the Time Goes–had
showcased her superb interpretations of songs by an astonishing array
of composers. They'd also varied in arrangement from near-classical to
country-rock, as well as starting to feature some of her own
compositions. Indeed, the only sure prediction you could make about a
Judy Collins album was that it would be unpredictable. The 1970 record Whales and Nightingales certainly
fit that bill in both sound and subject matter, with Jacques Brel and
Bob Dylan songs fitting side-by-side with traditional folk tunes,
gospel, and even an actual whale song. Yet for all its unconventional
territory, it would be one of her most popular releases, as well as
producing an international hit single.
In an unusual
and, in some ways, even radical approach, Collins and producer Mark
Abramson decided to record material for the album in several locations
outside of standard recording studios. As Judy sees it today, it was
"one of these situations where we wanted to get the right sound. And in
those days, you couldn't just dial it up. If you wanted to get the
sound of Carnegie Hall, you had to go there. So that's what we did." In
addition to Carnegie Hall, tracks were cut at the Manhattan Center (a
seventh-floor ballroom where Capitol Records had done numerous original
cast LPs) and St. Paul's chapel at Columbia University. "Our whole
approach was to get the sound of the place, to get the kind of feel of
those rooms," adds Collins. "A big deal in those days. You had to take
your recording truck and nothing was digital. It was all analog."
Amplifies engineer John Haeny in Elektra Records
founder/president Jac Holzman's memoir Follow the Music (co-written with
Gavan Daws), "We decided to pick locations that matched the emotional
ambience of the songs we were recording. Mark and I spent weeks
scouting locations. And then recording...What a time we had. We
recorded out of a converted red truck, with bums, panhandlers and
junkies all around us, during a hot steamy New York summer, and it was
just the most vibrant experience imaginable."
For all the cutting-edge adventurousness of the
recording methods, much of the material was more traditional in nature
than what Collins had usually put on her albums for nearly a decade.
"The Patriot Game" was written by Irishman Domenic Behan (also renowned
as a playwright and novelist), and had already become a folk standard
of sorts through recordings by the Clancy Brothers, the Dubliners, and
the Kingston Trio. "Simple Gifts" is, in the words of Judy's 1998
autobiography Singing Lessons,
"a song of Shaker origin about beauty in simplicity." "Oh, Had I a
Golden Thread" was written by Pete Seeger, an inspiration to Collins
and countless performers who began their careers in the folk revival,
and of course author of "Turn! Turn! Turn!," which Judy had memorably
covered back in the early 1960s on her third album.
Yet one of the traditional songs was, to say the
least, arranged in a most untraditional manner. For the whaling song
"Farewell to Tarwathie" features Roger Payne's actual recordings of
songs of humpback whales, at a time when awareness of whale songs, and
the availability of environmental recordings of that nature in general,
was far less widespread than it is today. As Collins explains, Payne, a
marine biologist with the New York Zoological Society, brought the
recordings to her "in the summer of 1969, when I was performing in Peer Gynt, the play, with Stacy
Keach in the lead of Peer Gynt; I was playing the all-suffering
Solveig. One night, this tall, good-looking man came backstage and
handed me this tape. He said, 'I want you to figure something out to do
with these whales. They're wonderful, and I'm entrusting them to you.'"
Continues Judy, "Of course, I had no clue what I was
gonna do with them. It was such an unusual sound, so beautiful but so
haunting. I decided, after I'd lived with them for a month or two, that
they really belonged with the whaling song¬–with the song that
could bring out the poignancy of how confusing and depressing the whole
question of whaling was. Because it still goes on. Roger Payne is still
fighting that fight. He continues to try to convince the Japanese and
the Russians, particularly, not to do this."
Collins had hardly, however, abandoned her search
for songs to cover by interesting contemporary singer-songwriters.
Leading off the album was Joan Baez's "Song for David," written for
Baez's then-husband David Harris, who was in jail at the time for
refusing induction into the military. Collins had been one of the first
prominent artists to record Bob Dylan compositions, and on Whales and Nightingales she opted
to sing his "Time Passes Slowly," which Dylan had recently done on his New Morning album. Having been a
big fan of Jacques Brel for years, and having already covered his "La
Colombe" on In My Life and "La Chanson des Vieux Amants (The Song of
Old Lovers)" on Wildflowers,
it's unsurprising she put a couple Brel songs on Whales and Nightingales, "Sons Of"
and "Marieke." Interestingly, she would re-record "Marieke" a decade
later for her 1980 album Running for
My Life.
Both of those tracks, as well as "Prothalamium"
(co-written by her keyboardist Michael Sahl and recorded in Carnegie
Hall) and "Nightingale II," were arranged and conducted by Joshua
Rifkin, who'd been a crucial contributor to the musical settings of In My Life and Wildflowers. "What you had with
Judy and myself were people who both had folk and classical
background," Rifkin commented about his collaborations with Collins in
an interview with the author in 2002. "Virtually none of us doing that
stuff then had an actual rock background. Folk, perhaps, was the link.
I think they brought me in because they were interested in trying
something new with her. My response was, when [Elektra] asked me about
arranging for her, 'I've never arranged before. So of course I'd love
to.' It is really extraordinary that they took these chances on me and
several other people. They were ready to try practically anything, or
try what appealed to them, and I for one am eternally grateful for
their having done so."
Added Rifkin, "Everybody was open to and looking for
new possibilities; people were very, very eager to try different
things, and see what would happen. There were, I think, at the same
time new possibilities for recognition and success that folk musicians
had not had before. Pop music now was changing, and it opened up
possibilities of folk-derived music being part of a sort of broader pop
scene. That was tantalizing, fascinating, challenging, and so forth."
Collins was especially pleased with Rifkin's work on
"Nightingale II," which along with the shorter "Nightingale I" marked
her only self-penned material on the record. "I had that melody in my
mind for a long time," she remembers. "It was supposed to be something
else about somebody. But then, I couldn't seem to get the lyrics to
work. Finally it turned into a kind of an Aesop's Fable, I guess. Josh
heard the melody first and said, 'I think I'd just like to orchestrate
that, and have it be kind of the duet with the song that you sing.'
Which I loved. I think he did a beautiful job."
By far the most famous song on Whales and Nightingales, however,
is its closing cut. While the hymn "Amazing Grace" has been performed
by innumerable artists, Collins's version remains the most commercially
successful vocal rendition of this standard, reaching #15 in the US and
#5 in the UK. Recorded at St. Paul's chapel at Columbia University, the
track features actor Stacy Keach, Alistair Cooke's son John, and one of
Judy's brothers among the backup singers.
"I had sung it one night when we were all together
at an event," Judy explains. "Mark was with me, and the next day he
called and said, 'We have to record that song.' The first thing we
tried to do at his suggestion was to put instruments to it, and it
didn't work at all. It was terrible. That was when I said, 'I've gotta
sing it with a group of friends, a cappella, with their joining in on
the harmonies.' So we just went up and did it. It certainly came to be
tremendously well known around the world." – Richie Unterberger
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