“My Father,” By Judy Collins

Part II of our Father’s Day Celebration

Judy Collins hasn’t written a lot of songs in her career. Mostly she’s sung the great songs of our greatest songwriters, all of whom she championed when they needed it most, including Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Steve Goodman.

But when she did write songs, she wrote stunning ones, such as the beautiful “Since You Asked,” which Dan Fogelberg and others also recorded.

And she wrote this one, “My Father,” one of the most beautiful songs for a father there is.

Her father, Charles Thomas, was not a miner, as in the song. He was a singer and radio host. He was also blind. A romantic man and one who did dream of France, though, as she said, He inspired the song. But sadly he never heard it.

“I wrote it in April ’68,” she said to Mojo. “I called (songwriter-folksinger) Tom Glazer and sent it to him, but didn’t call my father. My father died on May 4th, he never heard it. He had fallen sick on a trip to Hawaii in March and when he came back he couldn’t shake it. So this was troubling me as I wrote the song. But it’s very much about that romantic view of life that he had. He’d always promised us that will live in France. France was a big deal to him; the idea of France as the goal. Literature, Revolution, art, philosophy – France was the place.”

Her father had a big musical influence on her, buying Judy her first guitar, as well as teaching her a lot of the Irish songs he sang.  

“My father and I were very close,” she said in a video she posted online. “I’ve sing this song all around the world. I always think he hears it…. I hear my father singing to me.”

“He sang `Danny Boy,’” she said, “and ‘If You Ever Go Across The Sea To Ireland’ and ‘The Kerry Dancers.’ He had a lot of Irish songs in his repertoire. He was Irish, and he bragged about it all the time…. My father got me a guitar, he rented it… he didn’t want to pay a whole lot of money for something I wasn’t going to use. That was the beginning.”

He was only 57 when he died in 1968, just a few days past her 28th birthday. On May 4th, 2016, the 48th anniversary of his death, she posted the photo of him above with these words:

“My father, Chuck Collins, singer, performer, radio personality, à la the golden age of Radio in Seattle, Hollywood and Denver, Colorado, died 48 years ago, in 1968, Here he is, ready to go, early morning on KOA in Denver, reading his script (his engineer would have had a typed out version that daddy also wrote up, happy and smiling no matter what. Sorely missed, deeply loved, always in the hearts of his numerous and grateful family. Love forever, RIP.”

Here’s her original studio version of “My Father” from her 1968 album Who Knows Where The Times Goes?, produced by David Anderle, and featuring Van Dyke Parks on piano.

Following that is Nina Simone’s rendition of “My Father.”

In honor of all fathers on this Father’s Day of 2020.

My Father
By Judy Collins

My father always promised us
That we would live in France
We’d go boating on the Seine
And I would learn to dance

We lived in Ohio then
He worked in the mines
On his dreams like boats
We knew we would sail in time

All my sisters soon were gone
To Denver and Cheyenne
Marrying their grownup dreams
The lilacs and the man

I stayed behind the youngest still
Only danced alone
The colors of my father’s dreams
Faded without a sound

And I live in Paris now
My children dance and dream
Hearing the ways of a miner’s life
In words they’ve never seen

I sail my memories of home
Like boats across the Seine
And watch the Paris sun
As it sets in my father’s eyes again

My father always promised us
That we would live in France
We’d go boating on the Seine
And I would learn to dance

I sail my memories of home
Like boats across the Seine
And watch the Paris sun
As it sets in my father’s eyes again

Copyright The Wildflower Company/ASCAP