Judy Collins - Lenox Music Inn, Lenox, MA, 7-28-1973

I like posting bootleg concerts from quality musical acts that don't have their bootlegs shared that much. I also like posting rare bootleg concerts that deserve more attention, especially from long ago. So this one checks both of those boxes for me. It's a concert from singer-songwriter Judy Collins, in 1973.

I've posted three Collins concerts already, but all of those have been pretty short, an hour or less. This one actually is longer than typical concerts at the time, over an hour and a half.  

Collins was a very capable songwriter. For instance, at the time of this concert, her most recent album was 1973's "True Stories and Other Dreams," and this concert features three songs from it that she wrote on her own, "The Fisherman Song," "Secret Gardens," and "Song for Martin." However, she was better known for her covers of songs by other singer-songwriters, and we get plenty of those here, especially songs by Leonard Cohen (three) and Joni Mitchell (two).

This album remains unreleased. It's a soundboard, and the sound quality is excellent. 

This concert is an hour and 40 minutes long.

01 Oh, Had I a Golden Thread (Judy Collins)
02 Someday Soon (Judy Collins)
03 talk (Judy Collins)
04 City of New Orleans (Judy Collins)
05 talk (Judy Collins)
06 So Begins the Task (Judy Collins)
07 The Fisherman Song (Judy Collins)
08 Both Sides Now (Judy Collins)
09 The Hostage (Judy Collins)
10 Easy Times (Judy Collins)
11 Hard Lovin' Loser (Judy Collins)
12 Suzanne (Judy Collins)
13 Famous Blue Raincoat (Judy Collins)
14 Secret Gardens (Judy Collins)
15 talk (Judy Collins)
16 Song for Martin (Judy Collins)
17 Open the Door [Song for Judith] (Judy Collins)
18 Four Strong Winds (Judy Collins)
19 Chelsea Morning (Judy Collins)
20 My Father (Judy Collins)
21 Bird on a Wire (Judy Collins)
22 Sons Of (Judy Collins) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/M8ucm9Ew

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/leHO7HMJSrOxW65/file

I don't know when or where the cover photo is from, just that it's from the 1970s. 

Judy Collins with Leonard Cohen - PBS Soundstage, WTTW Studios, Chicago, IL, 1-20-1976

As I've been collecting and discovering lots of "PBS Soundstage" concerts in recent days, one pleasant surprise are the guest appearances. They aren't that common, but when they happened they usually resulted in interesting collaborations. This is such a case. Most of the concert features folk singer Judy Collins. That alone is pretty special, since the number of high quality bootlegs from her is very small. But even more interesting is her guest, Leonard Cohen, and the way they duet on a couple of his songs.

Cohen was a very fitting guest for her, because the two of them had a long history. When Cohen was starting his music career in 1966, Collins was absolutely key in getting it going by covering two of his songs on her next album, back before he'd given a single public performance or released any music, and hardly anyone in the music world knew who he was. In fact, Cohen explained this in some length in his banter during this concert. Collins would continue to be a friend and musical promoter, occasionally covering more of his songs on her albums. In 2004, she would release an entire album of Cohen covers, called "Democracy." 

At the time of this concert, Collins was probably at the peak of her commercial popularity, due to a hit single she'd had in 1975 with the song "Send in the Clowns." So it's not surprising that she closed the concert with that one. But for many, including myself, the highlight of this concert took place in the middle, when Cohen joined her on stage. She and him sang two of his songs as a duet, while she left the stage entirely to him for a third one, "Stranger Song." Later on in the concert, she sang yet another Cohen song without him, "Bird on the Wire."

By the way, I included the two songs they dueted on here on one of the Leonard Cohen BBC albums I made, "BBC Sessions, Volume 1." I didn't include his performance of "Stranger Song" from this concert however, because I didn't happen to stumble across that at the time. It was the only non-BBC material I put on that, since I thought it was something special. The cover image from that album shows both Cohen and Collins from this show. (Collins is wearing a different top in the two images because she changed outfits partway through the show - I watched the whole thing, so I know it's not from a different one.)

I felt very fortunate to find this concert at all. A few days ago, I began with a list of all the Soundstage concerts, thanks to the Wikipedia entry about that show:

Soundstage (TV series) - Wikipedia 

I went looking for the ones I wanted, which included this one. But I couldn't find it anywhere, except for the Cohen segment, which was widely available due to there being so many diehard Cohen fans. But after some more digging, I lucked out and found it streaming on an archived PBS webpage. (It's only one of two I've found that way.) I recorded it as I streamed it, converted it to audio, and then cut it into mp3s. So this may well be the first time this has been available as an audio bootleg.

Just like for the Roberta Flack Soundstage episode I just posted, an interview was done elsewhere and then spliced into the episode. (Although weirdly, she talked about the interviewer, Studs Turkel, and the interview in her banter between songs at one point. Probably, she already knew how the final edit was going to go.) I wanted just the concert, so I didn't include the two interview sections. The song "Secret Gardens" has "[Edit]" in its title because a tiny bit of the interview overlapped with the start of that song. I got rid of that talking using the UVR5 audio editing program, as usual.

This album is 56 minutes long.

01 My Father (Judy Collins)
02 Golden Apples of the Sun (Judy Collins)
03 talk (Judy Collins)
04 Someday Soon (Judy Collins)
05 Sons Of (Judy Collins)
06 talk (Judy Collins & Leonard Cohen)
07 Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye (Judy Collins & Leonard Cohen)
08 talk (Judy Collins & Leonard Cohen)
09 Stranger Song (Judy Collins & Leonard Cohen)
10 Suzanne (Judy Collins & Leonard Cohen)
11 Secret Gardens [Edit] (Judy Collins)
12 Both Sides Now (Judy Collins)
13 The Lovin' of the Game (Judy Collins)
14 talk (Judy Collins)
15 Bird on the Wire (Judy Collins)
16 Send in the Clowns (Judy Collins)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Wi4UM4Hn

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/HmoDZPg4F3xugPM/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took from this exact concert.

Various Artists - Folk America at the Barbican - Greenwich Village Revisited, Barbican Theatre, London, Britain, 2-13-2009

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I've been finding a lot of new BBC related music lately, as I keep searching for things for my big BBC project. I recently stumbled across this. It seems that in 2009, singer-songwriter Billy Bragg hosted a TV series about American folk music. The final episode (the fourth, I think) was this concert, which starred some of the most important singers from the 1960s folk movement. As you can tell from the subtitle, "Greenwich Village Revisited," there was a particular emphasis in picking people from the influential Greenwich Village scene in New York City. In addition to Bragg, a Briton who first got famous in the 1980s, the concert starred Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Carolyn Hester, Eric Andersen, and Judy Collins.

The entire concert was acoustic in nature, which was fitting, given the folk music they were paying tribute to. Each singer got to sing two or three songs (actually four in the case of McGuinn), and then they all came together at the end to do "Amazing Grace" as an encore.

If you like this type of music, this is a really nice concert. I believe it's unreleased. The sound quality is excellent.

This album is 58 minutes long.

01 I Ain't Got No Home (Billy Bragg)
02 talk (Billy Bragg)
03 My Back Pages (Roger McGuinn)
04 talk (Roger McGuinn)
05 Oh Freedom (Roger McGuinn)
06 talk (Roger McGuinn)
07 Eight Miles High (Roger McGuinn)
08 talk (Roger McGuinn)
09 Turn, Turn, Turn [To Everything There Is a Season] (Roger McGuinn)
10 talk (Billy Bragg)
11 talk (Carolyn Hester)
12 The Last Thing on My Mind (Carolyn Hester)
13 talk (Carolyn Hester)
14 The House of the Rising Sun (Carolyn Hester)
15 talk (Billy Bragg)
16 I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night (Billy Bragg)
17 talk (Billy Bragg)
18 Violets of Dawn (Eric Andersen)
19 talk (Eric Andersen & Roger McGuinn)
20 Thirsty Boots (Eric Andersen with Roger McGuinn)
21 talk (Billy Bragg)
22 Both Sides Now (Judy Collins)
23 talk (Judy Collins)
24 Anathea (Judy Collins)
25 Someday Soon (Judy Collins)
26 talk (Judy Collins)
27 Amazing Grace (Judy Collins & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/MsBkvi6j

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/kYDFYTvdQgOVFwe/file

The cover image is from this exact concert. However, I did a lot of manipulation in Photoshop to get it just as I wanted it. I started with a screenshot taken during the final song. But the image quality was very low-res. So I then took screenshots of the heads of each of the people in the image. I pasted those in for higher quality. I then ran the resulting image through the Krea AI program to iron out the kinks from having this really made out of six images. That helped. But then I did it again, and that helped some more.

Various Artists - A Musical Tribute to Woody Guthrie, Carnegie Hall, New York City, 1-20-1968

In October 1967, one of the all-time musical greats, Woody Guthrie, died at the age of 55. His health started declining in the late 1940s, and in 1952 he was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease, which causes a gradual decline in motor skills and mental abilities. He was hospitalized continuously from 1956 until his death. From the early 1960s onward, Bob Dylan regularly visited him in the hospital and sang songs for him, but so did Pete Seeger and many other folk singers.

Back in the 1960s, musical tribute concerts weren't really a thing yet, but Guthie was such a towering figure that there actually were three such concerts. I plan on posting all three eventually. This is the natural way to start, since it came first chronologically.

This concert was officially released in full as the album "A Tribute to Woody Guthrie, Part 1," in 1972. In 1970, another tribute concert for him happened, and that was eventually released as "A Tribute to Woody Guthrie, Part 2." Then, decades later, highlights from the two were combined onto one CD simply called "A Tribute to Woody Guthrie." 

Normally, I wouldn't post something that has been officially released in full. But I think in this case I can made a more listenable album by subtraction. What I mean is, the 1968 concert was a combination of songs that were sung and spoken word/poetry that was read, going back and forth between the two. I think the songs have a lot of relistening value, but I don't want to hear the spoken word parts that often. So I deleted almost twenty tracks of that, keeping just the music. If you want the full version, the official album is for you.

In removing those tracks, I was careful to manage the applause at the end of each song, since the spoken word part often started while the cheering was still going on. In some cases, I was able to fade the cheering down to bring it to a natural end. But when it was too short for that, I pasted in some cheering from the ends to other songs.

Now, let's get to the music, which consists entirely of songs written by Woody Guthrie, or cover songs he was closely associated with. This concert is most famous due to the appearance of Bob Dylan and the Band. It was important for several reasons. This was Dylan's first public performance since his motorcycle accident a year and a half earlier. It seems he wasn't actually that seriously injured in that accident, and it certainly didn't take him years to recover. But he'd been living a fast and crazy life of stardom and wanted to step away from all that for a while, and the accident gave him an excuse to go into seclusion. After this concert, Dylan basically went back into seclusion for another year or so. But he considered Woody Guthrie so important to his life that he made this rare public appearance during that time anyway.

Also important was the fact that Dylan was backed by the Band. Most members of the Band had backed him on a 1966 tour, and then during his "Basement Tapes" studio sessions in 1967. But at the time of this concert, they still hadn't made a name for themselves... both figuratively and literally! Since they literally didn't have a name to call themselves yet, for this concert, they were billed as "The Crackers," weirdly enough. Later in 1968, the Band would release their first studio album, "Music from Big Pink," to great critical acclaim. They would continue to back Dylan on other projects, including the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival concert and a 1974 tour. This concert was critical to their early career as well as their evolving musical connection with Dylan.

By the way, in addition to playing three songs with the Band, Dylan sang on two others: "This Train Is Bound for Glory" and the finale, "This Land Is Your Land." His voice is just one of many on the finale. As for "This Train Is Bound for Glory," he sang a verse on his own. Unfortunately, the album only included about a 30-second long snippet of that song, and his part wasn't included. I didn't include that snippet since I found it frustrating to only have a bit of the song. I'm guessing there was a flaw with the recording for much of the song.

The other stars of the concert were some of the biggest names in folk music at the time: Arlo Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's son, who had just hit it big with "Alice's Restaurant" in 1967), Judy Collins, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Richie Havens, and Tom Paxton. (I was asked the other day if I could post something by Pete Seeger. I couldn't think of anything worth posting. But then I remembered this concert.)

If you want to know more about this concert, here's an article in Rolling Stone Magazine about it that came out just a month after it took place:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-dylan-turns-up-for-woody-guthrie-memorial-197917/

This album is 56 minutes long.

01 Oklahoma Hills (Arlo Guthrie)
02 So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh [Dusty Old Dust] (Judy Collins)
03 Curly Headed Baby (Pete Seeger)
04 Ramblin' Round (Odetta)
05 Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad (Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie & Judy Collins)
06 Pretty Boy Floyd (Tom Paxton)
07 I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water (Richie Havens)
08 Plane Wreck at Los Gatos [Deportee] (Judy Collins)
09 Vigilante Man (Richie Havens)
10 Pastures of Plenty (Tom Paxton)
11 Grand Coulee Dam (Bob Dylan & the Band)
12 Dear Mrs. Roosevelt (Bob Dylan & the Band)
13 I Ain't Got No Home (Bob Dylan & the Band)
14 Roll On Columbia [Edit] (Judy Collins)
15 Jackhammer John (Pete Seeger & Richie Havens)
16 Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done [The Great Historical Bum] (Tom Paxton)
17 Union Maid (Judy Collins & Pete Seeger)
18 This Land Is Your Land (Will Geer, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/NrqpTP2Z

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/eas3q5bnIYHEX6d/file

What a historic photo for the cover! From left to right, that's Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Arlo Guthrie. I found a bunch of photos from this concert, but all of them were in black and white. I picked this one, and then colorized it with the Kolorize.cc program. It did a really good job, including picking the colors. I only had to make a few fixes in Photoshop.

Judy Collins - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: In Concert, London, Britain, 7-3-1974

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a "BBC Sessions, Volume 1" album by Judy Collins here. But after a few days, it got taken down due to copyright issues. That surprised me, because I'm pretty sure it was all unreleased material. So we'll see if we get in trouble with this one. If so, Judy Collins music must be banned in general, because this is all unreleased too.

This comes from a BBC TV show called "In Concert." (This is confusing, because the BBC has tended to call all sorts of radio and TV programs "In Concert.) This particular show by that name ran from 1971 to 1974. I've posted a bunch of other concerts from the series, but I only recently found this one.

As I often do, I found this on YouTube. I converted the video to audio, then broke it into mp3s. So I believe this is the first time this has been shared as music files.

It's a short concert, as all the ones from that TV show are. But Collins filled it with most of her best known songs at that point in her career. Collins bootlegs are extremely few and far between, so let's hope this stays posted.

This album is 33 minutes long.

01 Chelsea Morning (Judy Collins)
02 talk (Judy Collins)
03 Both Sides Now (Judy Collins)
04 talk (Judy Collins)
05 My Father (Judy Collins)
06 The Hostage (Judy Collins)
07 talk (Judy Collins)
08 Suzanne (Judy Collins)
09 Who Knows Where the Time Goes (Judy Collins)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6L2TPtkZ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/0nPEsMglLSzYdrR/file

The cover is a screenshot from this exact concert. For the text, I also used the same font and colors as the opening credits. However, I added the bottom line of text, and came up with my own color for that. In February 2025, I upgraded the image with the Krea AI program.

Judy Collins - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: Tonight in Person, London, Britain, 5-2-1966

In the mid-1960s, the BBC had an interesting folk music TV show called "Tonight in Person." Each show featured just one music act and lasted half an hour without commercials. In 2023, I posted a the audio from double episode that featured Peter, Paul and Mary. I recently came across another episode featuring Judy Collins, so here it is.

By 1966, Collins was one of the most famous folk singers in the world, generally covering songs written by others. By the time of this concert she'd switched from a purely acoustic sound to a folk-rock sound, so there was a small band backing her.

The sound quality is surprisingly great considering this is unreleased and from back in 1966. I only had to make two edits where there were minor glitches. I patched them using music from elsewhere in the same song. Those are the songs with "[Edit]" in their names.

The BBC show was fairly short, only about 28 minutes. So I looked around to see if there were any other TV or radio appearances from that time I could throw on as quasi-bonus tracks. I found two, from an appearance on the "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" in 1967. I stuck those on the end. Those are unreleased too.

You may notice I called this "BBC Sessions, Volume 1." I found another BBC concert she did in the 1970s. I plan on posting that soon.

This album is 35 minutes long, including the two Smothers Brothers extra songs.

01 Early Morning Rain (Judy Collins)
02 talk (Judy Collins)
03 Hey Nelly Nelly (Judy Collins)
04 talk (Judy Collins)
05 In My Life (Judy Collins)
06 talk (Judy Collins)
07 Silver Dagger (Judy Collins)
08 talk (Judy Collins)
09 Turn, Turn, Turn [To Everything There Is a Season] [Edit] (Judy Collins)
10 Ramblin' Boy (Judy Collins)
11 talk (Judy Collins)
12 Oh My Sweetheart (Judy Collins)
13 talk (Judy Collins)
14 Let's Get Together (Judy Collins)
15 I Think It's Going to Rain Today [Edit] (Judy Collins)
16 Hard Lovin' Loser & the Smothers Brothers (Judy Collins)

NOTE: The link has been removed due to a copyright issue. However, check out the comments below.

The full video of this concert can be found on YouTube if you look hard. This cover is a screenshot taken from that. I then colorized it with the help of the Palette program.