The Maid of Constant Sorrow

Wearing pants that stuck close to home and hair that should never have been let out alone, they looked alike. You could tell the boys from the girls only because some of them had names like Betty and Cindy Lou. They were all folk-song fans, come to Rhode Island last week for the fourth annual Newport Folk Music Festival.*

Jammed into Freebody Park, 15,000 of the faithful hummed, strummed and tapped sneakers as a single unit, outfitted not only with identical uniforms but with a mutual set of convictions that decry the injustices of war, segregation and cheating hearts. One by one, the cult's high priests (Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Odetta) filled the cloudy sky with music. And none did it with more urgency or passion than the slight blonde girl in the pink dress who hoisted a guitar twice her size and greeted the first drops of rain with a voice that built a shelter for her audience.

Judy Collins, 25, is neither a novice at her art nor as unfamiliar as some of her contemporaries with the sensation of distress. The folk circuit, her "road to communicate," is a lifetime's journey from the days when she performed as a piano soloist with the Denver Businessmen's Symphony. Seattle-born and Denver-bred, she was influenced by her blind father, who emceed a local radio show ("a potpourri of philosophy, piano and good music," she recalls).

After eleven years of extensive study. Judy gave up the piano in favor of a battered steel guitar that her father had given her, soon was haunting Denver's folk dens. "Folk music became my contact with other human beings," she says, "a way of saying what I think is happening inside their souls. What's happening in the music now is what happened in the Germany of Weill and Brecht--this outcry, this fury, this screaming 'It's exciting! It's exciting!' '' Like the song that she has established as her trademark, she is a "Maid of Constant Sorrow" who has "seen trials all of my days." She has suffered bouts of infantile paralysis, tuberculosis, an abortive attempt at college (one "mummifying" year at MacMurray College in Illinois) and another year in a marriage which ended in separation (one child).

In a versatile repertory ranging from the mournful Anathea ("Judge, oh, Judge, spare my brother") to the wryly exaggerated Silver Dagger Song, she displayed occasional flashes of bitter humor ("This is a sort of 'Happy Birthday, Mississippi' song," she said, introducing Hey, Nelly Nelly). More important, she exhibited a fine facility for dramatic phrasing and a rich, bell-clear alto voice stronger than Joan Baez' and in some ways more interesting. Her ecstatic audience was not surprised, for Judy Collins only proved in Newport last week what her legions of album-buying fans have known for some time --that she is a mere maid of constant sorrow no longer but a major contender for the feminine folk-music crown, second only to Baez among today's flock of urban folk stylists and perhaps first to have lived the songs before learning to sing them.

-Total attendance was a record 70,000, and though the crowds were well-behaved, thousands could not find hotel rooms, passed up the damp beaches, and bedded down instead in city parks and private yards, swarmed through the business area, blocking local traffic and preventing residents from getting to the stores. As a result, the city council banned Freebody Park as a future festival site. Newport appreciates the business, spokesmen announced last week, but wants the folkniks farther out of town.

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