Mississippi Summer
It isn’t right to block the doorway
It isn’t nice to go to jail.
—MALVINA REYNOLDS, “It Isn’t Nice”
NINETEEN sixty-four was awash with cultural and political events that would shake up the country. The journalist David Halberstam was openly criticizing the war in the New York Times, writing about the lies we were being told, helping to lift the veil of the 1950s, when we automatically believed that those in power told the truth. The country was still swaying with grief over Kennedy’s assassination; Lyndon Johnson, who had taken the oath of the presidency on Air Force One on November 22, 1963, after JFK was declared dead, was voted into office a year later by a 61 percent majority. The war in Vietnam was growing more intense. There was hope that Johnson would pull back our involvement in Indochina, but now it was becoming apparent that he took the party line on Vietnam.
Young men who were in danger of being drafted were heading north to Canada or finding ways to be exempted. For the first time, mental illness and acute anxiety were being considered as reasons to be rejected by the draft board. Kids, really, were looking closely at their draft numbers—were they high or low?—and deciding, with a new maturity, they were against war. And being against the war became somehow a matter of mental health. Were they crazy to be against war? A therapist could decide. My family worried about our boys: would they have to go off to fight?
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were also in the news. In 1954 de Beauvoir had published The Second Sex, a book I’d been assigned in my social studies class, and it had been a bellwether for the coming women’s consciousness movement, just beginning to take root in the United States. Like de Beauvoir, Sartre spoke openly against the war in Vietnam. In October 1964 he would receive the Nobel Prize in literature but refuse to accept it on the grounds that it would compromise his ability to be objective. It was a momentous action that caught the eye of the world.
Martin Luther King Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize and accepted, as was only right. His position on race could never be the subject of a compromise on objectivity.
Earlier that year, in January, Arthur Miller’s After the Fall opened in New York. I attended the play at a theater in downtown New York with Mark Abramson, sitting so close to the stage that I could feel the heat coming off Jason Robards Jr. and hear the roar of Marilyn’s voice in his words. Around the same time Meet the Beatles was released in the United States, and the foursome would take the nation by storm with their first American television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
IN January and February 1964 my destinations were Spokane, St. Louis, Montana, Boston, and Vermont—the same kind of seemingly random scheduling that marks my concert life today. I don’t know how I did it then, and I don’t know how I do it now.
On February 14, 1964, Jac Holzman gave me his own kind of Valentine’s gift—a big press party for my third album, Judy Collins 3, at a loft in Soho. Nina Holzman, Jac’s wife, had prepared this special party, with mountains of her fabulous, homemade, concoctions. (In L.A. a couple of years later, she would start a catering business called Pure Pleasure. And her food really was pure pleasure, becoming over those years in New York one of the reasons to go to an Elektra listening party for an artist.) Just about everyone I knew in the folk music industry was in attendance: Art D’Lugoff, the owner of the Village Gate; Jack Goddard, who wrote about music for the Village Voice; Phil Ochs; Tom Paxton, who was making another record for Elektra; my producer, Mark Abramson; and everyone who had played on the album—Eric Weissberg, Chuck Israels, and the cellist Bob Sylvester. Jim Friedman was there, my friend who wrote songs with Shel Silverstein, as was Oscar Brand. Oscar and I have known each other for fifty years. He, like so many of my friends from that time, has recorded with Elektra: albums of sea chanties, patriotic songs from his native Canada, songs of protest.
Oscar was among the original board members of the Children’s Television Workshop, which created PBS’s Sesame Street, one of whose intentions was to reach inner-city children. Although it has become an American institution, Sesame Street initially fell short of its goal in that respect, according to Oscar. Oscar groused about this fact so often, to Jim Henson and anyone else who would listen, that Henson named one of the Muppets Oscar the Grouch.
Ian and Sylvia Tyson and Charlie Rothschild, my road manager, were at the party that night, as was my friend Lucy Simon, whom I had met the year before when I taught her and her sister Carly “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in the funky dressing room at the Bitter End.
In the early 1960s Lucy and Carly formed a duo, and would release their first album, The Simon Sisters, on Kapp Records. “Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod” was a minor hit, and the album was followed by two more, Cuddlebug and The Lobster Quadrille.
When Carly and I met, she was a few years away from her solo career. She would often tell me shyly that she felt like the odd singer out. She had stage fright and a crippling fear of travel. She had sworn never to fly if she could avoid it. But in just a few years she would dazzle the world with her writing and her sexy, articulate, wondrous songs.
IN March 1964 I performed my first solo concert at Town Hall in New York. Harold and Jac suggested that we tape it, and Elektra would release the recording as my fourth album, The Judy Collins Concert.
I wore a new green velvet dress. Nina Holzman sent me to Elizabeth Arden—my first time there—for a massage before the performance, to ease my trembling nerves. I was singing new material, and though I was not sick-to-my-stomach nervous—it was more like thrilled-to-the-core nervous—my body was in a knot. But somehow I knew the night was going to be splendid, a one-take concert of new songs for a new album. We were very brave and optimistic, but I knew we could pull it off.
There were songs by Billy Edd Wheeler, a prolific and talented songwriter who would have his songs recorded by Bobby Darin, the Kingston Trio, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Kenny Rogers, and even Elvis Presley. Billy Edd was relatively unknown when I found three of his songs: the beautiful and evocative “Winter Sky,” “Red-Winged Blackbird,” and “Coal Tattoo,” one of the best work and ecological songs I have ever heard.
Traveling down that coal town road,
Listen to my rubber tires whine.
You can hear those rubber tires whine and the wheels rock in his lyrics about the decimation of the forests in our relentless quest for more coal.
Songs by Fred Neil, John Phillips, and Dick Weissman were also included. Dick, who was in the Journeymen with Scott McKenzie and John Phillips, wrote “Medgar Evers Lullaby,” a bedtime story about racial prejudice:
Your daddy is dead and he’s not coming back
and the reason they killed him was cause he was black.
There were a couple of traditional songs that tore at the heart, such as “Bonnie Boy Is Young,” said to be loosely based on the story of a seventeenth-century arranged marriage.
On “Wild Rippling Water,” Eric Weissberg and I play dancing guitars in the story of two lovers in the spring, and there is the Bob Dylan song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” The addition of a cello, later played by Robert Sylvester, a classical musician from Manhattan, gave this recording a new and strangely modern feel. George Martin had not yet written the string quartet parts for “Yesterday,” the Beatles song that would come out in 1965, but there was a musical feast going on in my own heart and head, and I was happy to break from convention. There had not been a cello on a folk recording yet; or if there was one, I did not know about it. Robert was a wonderful player and added a new dimension to the ensemble of my guitar, the guitar of Steve Mandell, and the classical bass of Chuck Israels, who could be heard regularly playing at the Blue Note with jazz pianist Bill Evans.
A FEW weeks after my concert recording was done, Dick Fariña and Mimi Baez came down to the studios of WBAI in lower Manhattan to be guests on my radio show. Mimi, Joan Baez’s younger sister, was strikingly beautiful, with dark eyes and lustrous black hair that grew beyond her shoulders. Her nature was sweet, giving, and openhearted. Mimi’s dazzling looks caught at the throat, plunging many men (and even women) into ecstatic claims of love. They were a remarkable couple who had started writing songs as soon as they found each other. That day in the studio, Mimi played her Martin guitar; Dick played his Emerson dulcimer, the gift from his first wife, Carolyn Hester.
I had become close friends with Fariña after we met at Montowese House when he was married to Carolyn Hester in 1961. I visited Carolyn and Dick on Martha’s Vineyard, and saw Dick often in New York City, where he had the habit of dropping in to stay at my apartments in the Village and later on the Upper West Side. (There is a quaint picture of Richard and me shopping with Mimi at Zabar’s, where we bought exotic cheeses and roamed the aisles while their German shepherd, Lush, waited patiently outside, greeting every customer with a bark and a wag.)
By 1964, Dick had met Mimi Baez and won her heart, and then her hand. Their first meeting was at a picnic in a park near Chartres Cathedral in France. Mimi was just sixteen and still living with her parents. She later told me the story of how she got truly drunk for the first time that day at Chartres and threw up all over Dick. In lighter moments, she would say that had been the key to his heart, which was altogether possible; he was always wonderfully off in the way he interpreted what might be romantic.
Mimi was over the moon about Fariña. Dick wooed her with letters and sometimes poetry—“Young girl, you chose the amber coil of a wish”—using references that occur often in his writing. His poem to me, which he wrote as liner notes to the album on which he and Mimi later played their wonderful songs “Hard Loving Loser” and “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” uses a similar scheme to describe the sound of my voice: “If amethysts could sing …”
Against her mother’s and father’s protestations, and in secret, Mimi married her poet/writer/singer in Paris in April 1963. Mimi was only seventeen. A year later, when she turned eighteen, they had a celebration of their wedding in Carmel, California. So in June 1964 I headed out to Carmel to celebrate their marriage.
There were flowers in Mimi’s hair, there was music from some local singers, and her sister Joan wrote and sang a song to her sister and her new husband. Dick and Mimi were happy together, and apparently Big Joan had overcome her objections. If she had not come completely around on Dick, at least she had begun to appreciate the joy Mimi took in her husband.
After seeing them in Carmel, and celebrating this romance written in the stars, as Richard would describe it to me, I headed to Colorado to sing at Red Rocks, the outdoor summer venue in Morrison, just west of Denver. In the rugged, open-air amphitheater I sang all the songs I had just recorded, thrilled to be in my Rockies again, even if only for a few days. I saw my mom and my dad, and all my siblings. I had that feeling I always have in the mountains: I felt at peace with myself.
I had Clark with me for most of the summer, in Colorado and in New York. My friend Linda Liebman accompanied us to the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and someone took a great photo of Clark leaning on one of the fences, looking up at the stage, with Linda at his side. He got to sing and have meals with Pete Seeger and John Cooke, and he simply drank it all in. He loved the music, listening to guitar players, dancing to the banjos.
After the festival, we went to Cape Cod with the Holzmans, where Clark played in the sand with Jaclyn and Adam, the Holzmans’ children, and we all ate grilled burgers and hot dogs. Then it was back to Storrs for Clark, and back home for me, to the nerve-wracking reality of the custody case, which was still unsettled.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964. At the same time, the situation in Vietnam was getting hotter with each passing month, with American and Vietnamese deaths piling up; in August, at the Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer would present the credentials for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, challenging the all-white Mississippi delegation.
In August Bob Dylan turned the Beatles on to pot for the first time, and in September the Warren Commission released its report on the assassination of JFK, saying a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had killed the president. Also in 1964, Lenny Bruce spent four months in jail for obscenity; Michelle Obama and Glenn Beck were born; and it cost 5 cents to send a letter to your congressman or your lover.
But Camelot had lost its king, and a miasma of grief still hung over the nation, while Jackie Kennedy and the rest of the family continued sculpting and burnishing JFK’s legacy.
IN August I went to Mississippi—a far cry from the quaint villages and idyllic beaches of Cape Cod—to help register African American voters in what would be referred to as Freedom Summer or the Mississippi Summer Project. Workers from the offices of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), two of the organizations sponsoring groups of volunteers to go South to ensure the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in racially segregated states, helped organize my travel. I flew into Jackson, Mississippi, where I was met by Barbara Dane, an activist and jazz singer from San Francisco whom I knew.
Barbara had many admirers, including Louis Armstrong, and a solid reputation in the world of jazz. She had opened her own club in San Francisco called Sugar Hill, which featured great jazz and blues artists—Mose Allison, Big Mama Thornton, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee, with whom I had worked in Chicago at the Gate of Horn in my first few days at the club in 1960. (Barbara later married Irwin Silber, a critic and the founder of Sing Out.)
Barbara was thirty-seven when we met in 1964, a big-hearted blonde, outspoken and generous with her knowledge and her insight into what was going on in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. She helped me get settled in with other volunteer artists and lawyers at the Jackson Holiday Inn, introduced me to the people with whom I’d be traveling, and took me to my first voter registration rallies.
The offices of COFO were on Lynch Street in Jackson. A number of workers in the Mississippi Freedom Project had already been beaten up by that time—eighty of them, according to the people I spoke to at the offices of SCLC. During the two weeks I was there, traveling from Ruleville to Greenville to Jackson and back, everyone knew Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Michael Goodman had been murdered. They had been abducted, tortured, and killed by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, their bodies buried in a muddy earthen dam. Fear pulsed along the roads and in the towns.
I traveled with the New Gate Singers, a band of three long-haired, sweet-tempered kids from Chicago. We drove in their VW bus through the summer heat of Mississippi, stopping over in black neighborhoods and staying with black families, the only safe places for white rabble-rousers from the North. In the daytime, I would help the organizers I admired so much from CORE and sing for the crowds of people who gathered.
Of the many moving and memorable experiences for me that summer, perhaps none left more of an impression than the few inspiring days I spent traveling with Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou came from Mound Bayou, Mississippi (home of the murdered Medgar Evers), and was nearly fifty-seven when I met her. She had been an activist most of her life, influenced by Thurgood Marshall, Mahalia Jackson, and other powerful civil rights leaders and artists. Fannie Lou had been working with SNCC since 1962. She and I talked in the van while I was changing the strings on my guitar, my hands shaking, as we prepared to stop at another site to encourage people to get out and register to vote. I could always feel the violence and hatred looming in the air of the towns we passed through, white faces pressed to windows, white men standing rigid in their yards, staring out from behind their fences, their eyes warning us to go home, telling us we had no business in Mississippi. I asked Fannie Lou if she was afraid.
“Why should I be afraid?” she said. “They can only kill me, and seems to me they been trying to do that since I was a little girl!” Fannie Lou had already seen too much hardship and terror in her life—racism, beatings, and lynchings. In 1961, she had been sterilized without her knowledge or consent while having routine, minor surgery.
“I have my faith,” she said. “I am not afraid.” I gazed out the window of the van at the cold and hate-filled faces in passing cars. I knew I would have to stay close to Fannie Lou and draw courage from her.
In the heat of a poor black neighborhood in Ruleville or Greenville, where not a soul could be seen on the street, Fannie Lou would plant her feet in the dust in front of a gaggle of run-down houses. Then she’d open her mouth and sing:
“Oh freedom,” she would belt. “Oh freedom!”
Sweat would pour down her beautiful black face as she sang. A person or two would peek behind a curtain.
“Oh freedom over me!”
A door or two would open a crack, then another few inches. I stood beside Fannie Lou, starting to hum and harmonize.
“And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave!”
Before long, the doors would crack open in house after house, and men and women would shyly start to emerge into the sun, children sheltering between their legs as their mothers wiped hands on aprons, smiles beginning to form in their eyes and hearts.
“And go home to my Lord and be free!” A chorus of a dozen, two dozen, maybe three, then five, would form around Fannie Lou, drawn by her big, round, full notes mingled with my voice. Her singing was like a winding summer vine, corralling their emotions, bringing them out of doors, luring them from their fear. When the yard was crowded with people, Fannie Lou would begin to speak about why she was there.
“I want you to go down to that courthouse and I want you to register your name so that you can vote, put your money where your mouths are, and vote for the people you want to have in your government.”
“But we can’t do that, they’ll kill us,” many would shout. Bull Connor was hosing people and bashing heads in Selma and white policemen were harassing and beating black people as well as activists all over the South for the attempts to get blacks out to vote, to eat in public places, to go to school together. People tried to keep their heads down and stay out of the way of the white police, who were armed with nightsticks, and the Klan, which was flourishing in Mississippi at that time. Many had seen crosses burned on their lawns, friends lynched.
Fannie Lou would persist: “You have to do this, you have to use your voices.” Those who had not known they had voices would begin to shine in Fannie Lou’s light.
For the days I traveled with her, I was a witness to her power. She revived my spirits, too, in that hot humid summer when the trucks passed us on back roads, gun racks visible in their windows, and I didn’t know if I should be more worried if the racks were full or if they were empty.
“You got to have faith,” she would say to me as we tucked into our borrowed beds in a home one night. I had told her about my divorce and the ongoing custody battle. “You are going to get that boy of yours back, I just know it.” Faith was going to have to go a long way, but when Fannie Lou talked to you about faith, you felt certain you could do anything.
I didn’t know whether faith would help, but by God I started praying again, all because of Fannie Lou Hamer.