Judy Collins is one of those figures whose influence is almost impossible to overstate precisely because it was so often invisible. She didn't write 'Both Sides, Now' — Joni Mitchell did — but Collins recorded it first, reached the US Top 10 with it, and won a Grammy for it in 1968, before most people knew Mitchell's name. That is the Collins pattern: an ear so good it functions as an A&R department for a generation. She came up in the folk revival's most fertile ground, early 1960s New York, where the coffee-house circuit was essentially a finishing school for American songwriting. Collins was not a bystander. She was a peer — to Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Stephen Sondheim, and the tangled orbit of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with whom her personal history with Stephen Stills produced a minor industry of heartbreak songs traded across albums. The range is what surprises people who only know her from the folk canon. Her version of Sondheim's 'Send in the Clowns' isn't a curiosity — it competes with Sinatra's as the defining recording, and she charted with it twice, in 1975 and again in 1977. That is a genuinely unusual achievement: folk singer, pop crossover, Sondheim interpreter, all at a credible level. Then there is the film. In 1974, Collins directed 'Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman,' a documentary about her former music tutor, conductor Antonia Brico, that earned an Academy Award nomination. In a career full of firsts-by-proximity, this one is entirely hers. She is now 87, with 36 studio albums behind her, and she is winding down touring with a farewell run that reaches the UK for a single night at the London Palladium on 6 February, with Elles Bailey, Eliza Carthy, Seth Lakeman, and Katherine Priddy joining her. The Guardian is collecting reader questions ahead of a published interview later in the week. The deadline is 4pm GMT on Tuesday 10 November.
