In this moving new volume, she takes her richest journey yet through her musical past. The singer has released several previous autobiographical books, including “Trust Your Heart,” published in 1987. But as Collins writes, “Any real emotional commitment seemed impossible for me.” The one with the guitarist Stephen Stills inspired him to write “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” an anguished conceptual piece that he recorded with his band, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Along the way came depression, blackouts, bulimia, suicidal fantasies and so many stormy love affairs it was hard to keep track. In her teens, Collins had begun a 23-year drinking problem of mounting severity. Her unshakable calm hid the harder facts of her life, but her new memoir exposes them. “Albatross” asked, “Will there never be a prince who rides along the sea and the mountains / Scattering the sand and the foam into amethyst fountains?” At the piano she delivered her original songs, full of lush storybook imagery and longing for the unreachable. She voiced the cries of French revolutionary peasants in a medley from “Marat/Sade,” a 1965 Broadway production she walked the gangplank to suicide in Leonard Cohen’s “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” Later Collins recorded “Send in the Clowns,” an actress’s archly formal swan song from Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” and made it the unlikeliest of disco-era hits.

Onstage, she ventured with her guitar to places that few folk singers went.

Hurt was etched into her voice: a soprano with an earthy sweetness, floating forlornly like a stray balloon.

But one didn’t listen to Collins to feel good. Collins spoke to the lost soul in all of them when she sang, in Mitchell’s words, “I really don’t know life at all.”Ī few joyful songs appeared in her repertory, notably “Amazing Grace,” the 18th-century hymn that she took to the charts in 1970. Just months before, Collins had scored a top-10 hit with Joni Mitchell’s pained lament “Both Sides Now.” The record broke through in an age of Vietnam protesters and social revolutionaries, out to save the world but often floundering personally of young Americans caught between the conformity of their parents’ generation and the pressure to rebel. The label accompanied a photo of a young woman whose distant, blue-eyed gaze hinted at strife of her own. “Gentle voice amid the strife” is how Life magazine described the folk singer Judy Collins on the cover of its May 2, 1969, issue.

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