Judy Collins at Café Carlyle Judy Collins opened a run at the Café Carlyle on Tuesday with "Kingdom Come," a tribute to New York City firefighters killed at ground zero. Tuesday being the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on top of the continuing Woody Guthrie centennial, the opening-night performance of Judy Collins's sixth season at Café Carlyle had a ceremonial sense of occasion. As she delivered a stirring rendition of her anthem "Kingdom Come," a tribute to New York City firefighters killed in the World Trade Center, my mind flashed back to the day of the tragedy on a similarly clear and mild September morning. Throughout her career Ms. Collins has been an unwavering Guthrie champion and steadfast liberal. And in the show, most of which she spent accompanying herself on guitar, with her musical director Russell Walden on keyboards, the politically engaged folk singer took precedence over the art singer of later years. The show follows the publication of an autobiography, "Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music." More than usual Ms. Collins's dialogue with the times in her music and in her writing emerged as a theme. She was present at the creation of so much cultural history. Her voice, songwriting and prose all belong to the same stream whose distinctive quality is a diamondlike clarity. Her soprano, although a little thinner than it used to be, remains essentially unchanged. Its silvery tone with its laserlike focus is a beam leading out of darkness toward higher altitudes. To hear her a cappella version of "Danny Boy" was to be transported to an ethereal plateau under a canopy of stars. Ms. Collins, who grew up in Colorado, described herself as a "mountain girl." And the heavily echoed acoustics conjured the reverberating calls of mountaineers in Rocky Mountain passes: the same lofty sound heard on John Denver records with the same inspirational grounding. Sandwiched between favorites like "Both Sides Now" and "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" were unfamiliar numbers like Jimmy Webb's "Campo de Encino," Ricky Ian Gordon's "Horse With Wings" and Ms. Collins's own "In the Twilight," a recent piano-based ballad written for her mother. Ms. Collins told stories of her parents" courtship and of her relationship with Steven Stills around the time of the formation of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and sang their song "Helplessly Hoping." The finale, the Beatles song, "In My Life," quietly underlined her career's astonishing 50-year continuity. Judy Collins's show runs through Sept. 29 at Café Carlyle, at the Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan; (212) 744-1600, thecarlyle.com.