The legendary folk artist Judy Collins has been a respected personality on the music landscape for the last six decades, a singer, guitarist, songwriter and more recently a film director, who was a key figure in the burgeoning folk scene of the 1960s and has remained a popular performer and recording artist right through the rock era, scoring her first No.1 in the US album chart in 2019 at the age of 80.

Originally studying classical piano, she became captivated by the protest songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and turned to performing folk in clubs in Colorado where her family lived. Moving from Denver to Connecticut, where her husband was a university teacher, she became involved in the Greenwich Village folk scene where artists like Odetta and Dave Van Ronk were active, along with newer arrivals like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and was spotted by Jac Holzman, who in 1950 had launched the Elektra label, specialising in folk, and she remained with the label for 35 years.

This collection includes the complete original contents of her first two Elektra albums A Maid Of Constant Sorrow and Golden Apples Of The Sun. The repertoire is a blend of traditional songs interpreted by Judy and her own original compositions. In 2019 at the age of 80, she scored her first No.1 album on an American Billboard Chart with Winter Stories, a duet album with Jonas Fjeld featuring the bluegrass musical group Chatham County Line.

Last year, she released her first album of all original material, entitled Spellbound. The recordings presented here mark the beginning of a long and illustrious recording career, and they admirable showcase the qualities which made her a one of the era’s most important acoustic artists.

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