Sportdiver.com; Judy Collins: How a Pop Song Saved Whales By Marina Guerges August 28, 2015

In 1970, singer-songwriter Judy Collins recorded her hit album Whales and Nightingales. Included in the album is a song called “Farewell to Tarwathie,” in which Collins debuted a haunting duet, singing alongside the sounds of whales. Accompanying the lyrics (“I bid you farewell / I’m bound off for Greenland / and ready to sail in hopes to find riches / in hunting the whale”), Collins incorporated recordings of whale songs. The impetus for the song came after biologist Roger Payne handed Collins a reel-to-reel tape of whale songs in the summer of 1969. “It was very emotional,” Collins told Michael May of Public Radio International. “Angst for being a human being on a planet where they also live, guilt for doing what we do to them.”

Payne had obtained the recordings from sound engineer and military researcher Frank Watlington. “These sounds are, without exception, the most provocative, most beautiful sounds by any animal on Earth. After a long while of listening, I suddenly realized: ‘My God, this thing is repeating itself,’” says Payne. He distributed the recordings to musicians, composers and singers. His purpose, as Payne told PRI’s May, “was to build them into human culture.” After releasing the album, Collins donated a portion of the royalties to Payne’s conservation work. Payne later hit gold when Capitol Records picked up his recordings and released Songs of the Humpback Whale. Payne’s album inspired a Greenpeace movement called Save the Whales. In 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act was established to protect all marine mammals in U.S. waters, including whales. In the 1980s, the International Whaling Commission banned deep-sea whaling; today, only a handful of countries hunt whales.