Concert Review: Judy Collins weaves stories, music and magic at Segerstrom

Judy Collins has plenty of memories of her childhood Christmases. Her father, who ran a radio show, would bring home store employees who had given him good bargains. Fruitcakes were a staple of the family kitchen, baked early in the season and drizzled with rum to keep them moist.

And Collins recalls the prayer she used to recite before the time came to open her gifts: “Dear God — no books, no clothes.”

Considering that Collins later became an author herself — her memoir, “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes,” came out in 2011 — that aversion to books clearly didn’t last. And at her holiday-themed concert Saturday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, she came off as a historian as much as a musician.

That may be a given for any singer who’s enjoyed a 55-year career (“the second-oldest profession in the world,” as Collins slyly called it), and when that career intersected with those of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Al Kooper, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Webb, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Stills — well, just pull up a chair and let the evening go. Or, for old time’s sake, think of it as a pop family Christmas, with plenty of luminaries there in spirit.

In between songs, which featured accompaniment by pianist Russell Walden and the Passenger String Quartet, Collins shared stories that have no doubt livened a holiday dinner or two.

There was the time Kooper called her at 3 a.m. and put a strange woman (presumably Mitchell) on the line to sing “Both Sides, Now,” which Collins turned into a Grammy-winning cover version; the time a younger musician approached Collins to praise her work on “Sesame Street”; and the singer’s fear of becoming obsolete in the mid-1970s, when Donna Summer and disco became popular.

As for Dylan, Collins recalled her initially bemused reaction to his oft-scrutinized singing voice — one that opened the doors for any number of performers without Collins-like vocal cords. Like many, though, she later warmed to that idiosyncratic twang, and before a luminous reading of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” she paid an accurate tribute.

“Beautiful is, let’s say, an adjustable word,” Collins said. “But it was beautiful to our ears, and still is, because of what he was saying.”

That message often trumps technical proficiency in folk music, but Collins’ soprano could hold its own on any “American Idol”-style competition: warm, deep, tremulous and sounding barely older than it did half a century ago. She began Saturday’s show a cappella, singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” offstage before stepping on with her guitar, and sang an encore of “Amazing Grace” that also began without accompaniment.

Collins has won so much acclaim as a covers artist that it’s easy to overlook her songwriting contributions, but two of the high points Saturday were “Albatross” (from her breakthrough 1967 album “Wildflowers,” the mention of which drew applause) and “Since You’ve Asked.” She noted that she wrote the latter, her first composition, after Cohen urged her to try her hand at songwriting, and the lyrics’ theme of a long road traveled with a partner gained added poignancy coming from an older performer.

As her last song before the encore, Collins performed one of her standards: the Stephen Sondheim show tune “Send in the Clowns,” which ends, appropriately enough, with the words “Well, maybe next year.”

That’s a few weeks from now, but Christmas comes before then. And for those looking to reward Collins for her efforts, books and clothes ought to suffice.