JUDY Collins fans are in for a treat when she makes her third visit to the Tivoli at Wimborne next Saturday, 11th June.

Not only will she be performing the songs for which she has been famous through the generations, but also offering a preview of her new album, Bohemian, due to be released in October.

It includes several new songs she has written, as well as Woody Guthrie's Pastures of Plenty and favourites from Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Webb.

The album will coincide with an autobiography Judy Blue Eyes, in which the 71-year- old singer goes back to her early days in Greenwich Village and talks about the artists with whom she has worked along the way.

She used to record for Electra Records, and says that researching the book she has realised that "just about every folk singer who ambled through The Village in the 60s" made a record for Electra.

"And they stand up now really well," says the woman who trained as a classical pianist, and took home her first pay cheque as a musician in 1959. Two years later came the first recording contract, and undimmed, Judy is intending to go on for 30 or 40 years yet.

"The last soldier from the First World War has just died, aged 110, and I can go on that long. I take care of myself these days," she says.

She has a theory about why her generation of singers, which includes Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris and Leonard Cohen, retain their power as well as their popularity into a seventh decade.

"I think they knew that our music would be needed – as much now in the 21st century as in the 60s and 70s – so they gave us a good gene pool to get us through," she says.

She has always written her own songs as well as performing the works of other singers and songwriters, she intends to concentrate even more on composition in the future.

The new album includes a song called Marjorie, dedicated to her mother who died last December, and it has been a catalyst for other songs on the album. She wrote Wings of Angels for her son Clark, after his suicide in 1992, and recorded it on a live album "that vanished in the dust." A reworking of the song is part of Bohemian, as well as songs about Big Sur and Morocco.

When she was last in England, two years go, Judy heard a song on a television advertisement. "I didn't understand the ad (It was for A T and T) but I thought the song was a real winner. Then I found out it was called Pure Imagination and had been sung by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka, and I wanted to record it. So it's on the album."

She also keeps up with an annual, and anonymous, American songwriting contest, and every year the organisers send her submitted entries.

"There is always something special in these, and when I heard Veterans Day, I knew it was the one."

Discovering it had been composed by Michael Veitch, she contacted him and asked if she could record it. So the song from his Heartlander album is about to be released on Bohemian.

And as well as her 13-date UK tour (the only other stop in the south is at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 26th June) Judy continues to tour in the US, to run her own Wildflower Records label, and to organise (and record) the Judy Collins Wildflower Festival, involving some of the singers and songwriters she has known over the years. Audiences might see Tom Paxton, Janis Ian, Arlo Guthrie and Eric Anderson as well as Judy.

She had never heard of Wimborne before her agent contacted Charlie North Lewis to see if he'd like to include her on his programme. That was five years ago.

Now Charlie hopes that the Tivoli will be a firm fixture on Judy's concert schedule whenever she's in England, and her local fans have been delighted by her performances, which take in the early hits, introduce new songs and underline what she says about the gene pool.

Her piano playing far outshines that of her contemporaries (well, it was her early training), and her voice is as pure and plangent and strong as ever.

Her Wimborne concert starts at 8pm.