Who was ‘Judy Blue Eyes’ from the Crosby, Stills and Nash song?
On April 26th, 1968, Stephen Stills found himself recording in A&R Studios in New York as a handy session guitarist for his girlfriend at the time.
His band, Buffalo Springfield, was falling apart and on the cusp of breaking up. Encumbered by the stress of his fledgling career going down the drain, his romantic relationship seemed to be heading that way, too. Though widely esteemed as both an ace guitarist and a stunning singer, he needed a new lease of life.
Once the session was finished, Stills paid the recording engineer to let him stay a little longer, recording on his own would-be hit in the studio. His girlfriend left with the other musicians, telling him, “Don’t stay in here all night now”. But Stills felt possessed with a passion empowered by a ‘now or never’ mentality.
After the engineer agreed to his request, Stills simply, and somewhat dramatically, told him, “Set up all the microphones to the piano, and the guitars and my voice, and just roll tape.” He began playing a set of songs no one had ever heard before. Three of these songs would form the core of a new band he would soon form with Hollies bassist Graham Nash and Byrds guitarist David Crosby.
Among them was ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, a stunning three-part opus (with a fourth to be added later when Neil Young entered the mix) about the woman who’d just left him alone to record it. And his desperate, yearning sorrow at their impending split. “It was imminent,” Stills later admitted to National Public Radio. And this was its heartfelt finale, fatefully linked directly by circumstance.
So, who was his inspiring girlfriend?
The Judy in question was singer-songwriter Judy Collins, who was best known at the time for her recording of the Joni Mitchell song ‘Both Sides Now’. Collins had scored a huge hit with the track, which Mitchell wasn’t all that happy about. Stills had been living with the emerging starlet since the start of 1968, and the two would continue their relationship into the following year.
However, tensions were already apparent as early as this April 1968 session. “We were just a little too big for one house,” Stills supposed. “But we were having a grand old time. And I, of course, being the age I was, was completely head over heels.” His feelings long outlasted their time together, though, and inspired dozens more songs, ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ was just the start.
Some of these ended up on his self-titled debut solo album in 1970, while others appeared in his 2017 collaboration with Collins Everybody Knows. No other ode to Stills’ first true love could quite outdo the first to be released, however.
With its extraordinary compositional range, exquisite vocal harmonies and Keatsian lyricism, ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ stands out even in the canon of great love songs written by legendary artists for their collaborative muses – something central to Crosby, Stills and Nash as a whole. Yet it still wasn’t enough to keep its writer and his muse together for long, even if Collins was flattered by the creation.
The song would rise to 21st in the US charts and helped to launch the unlucky in love trio as the hottest new folk outfit, honouring the now bygone Greenwich Village folk explosion from the beginning of the swinging decade.
