My friend Larry Collins has died. Larry was one half of the legendary Collins Kids. I always thought that Larry would be the last original 1950s rockabilly artist standing—born in 1944, he certainly was the youngest. It was not to be. Larry passed away on Friday, January 5, 2024.
Larry and his sister Lorrie began singing together in the hillbilly pre–rock ‘n’ roll days of the early 1950s. On the advice of Oklahoma-based Leon McAuliffe (a well-known steel guitarist from Bob Wills’s band, the Texas Playboys), the Collins family moved from Oklahoma to California in search of a better life. They found it at the popular Town Hall Party country music television show based in Compton, a show broadcast live for four hours every Saturday night on KTTV Channel 11. Larry was a nine-year old guitar prodigy and Lorrie was an eleven-year-old singer with the vocal delivery of a grown woman, when they were hired as a novelty kid act and christened “The Collins Kids.”
Larry was taken under the wing of country guitar legend Joe Maphis, known as the King of the Strings. Shortly after he and his sister became regulars on the Town Hall Party show, Joe Maphis and Larry became a twin-guitar terror, playing a pair of custom-built doubleneck Mosrite guitars at lightning speed, thrilling audiences with their frantic guitar wizardry. Despite his young age, Larry rose to the occasion. Soon he became one of the stars of Town Hall Party, running and jumping all over the stage with his massive Mosrite doubleneck guitar strapped around his neck.
In 1955 the Collins Kids signed to Columbia Records, the same label that Joe and Rose Lee Maphis and many of the other Town Hall Party acts were signed to. The record label didn’t really know what to do with them. Their earliest records, released in 1955 and 1956, “Beetle Bug Bop” and “I’m in My Teens,” were cutesy, lighthearted fare (produced by Columbia Records’ Mitch Miller, who famously hated rock ‘n’ roll), songs that seemed to acknowledge the emergence of rockabilly but with none of the delinquent danger associated with Elvis Presley.
In real life, despite their youthful age, Larry and Lorrie were perhaps the earliest white purveyors of rock ‘n’ roll music on the West Coast, performing covers of Joe Turner rhythm and blues songs at a Hollywood Bowl country music concert in 1955. Like many teenagers of the era, they listened to Black music on Los Angeles’s late-night radio stations, as well as Wolfman Jack, who broadcast risqué R&B from his border radio station in Tijuana (Larry told me that it was a ritual for them to listen to Wolfman Jack’s show on their father’s car radio driving from the Town Hall Party show in Compton back to their home in the San Fernando Valley). When Larry and Lorrie combined rhythm and blues with their authentic Oklahoma hillbilly musical background, the Collins Kids quickly became rockabilly royalty of the highest order. They were the real deal.
As rock ‘n’ roll took over the music business between 1956 and 1958, Mitch Miller relented and let the Collinses have more input in the recording studio. Records were released that crackled with electricity and abandon—discs like “Mercy,” “Hoy Hoy,” “Rock Boppin’ Baby,” “Let’s Have a Party,” and Larry’s solo effort, the proto-punk “Whistle Bait.” All of these records were excellent—more than excellent, in fact—but none of them became hits. Despite their constant touring and regular television appearances, the Collins Kids were perhaps a little too country for rock ‘n’ roll audiences and just a little too rock ‘n’ roll for country audiences. But although their records never reached hit status in the United States, they became cult hits on the British and European rockabilly scenes.
During their heyday in the late 1950s, Lorrie dated singer Ricky Nelson and appeared with Nelson on the Ozzie and Harriet television show. Larry gave guitar lessons to another one of Lorrie’s would-be suitors, a young Lebanese guitarist from Boston named Richard Monsour, who had been showing up on amateur night at Town Hall Party trying to get on the air. One of the show’s comedians, a four-hundred-pound hillbilly mascot named Texas Tiny, suggested that Monsour change his name to the more show-business-friendly Dick Dale. After taking several lessons from Larry at the Collins home in Van Nuys, Monsour (née Dale) adopted Larry’s breakneck rockabilly boogie guitar style as best he could; the result was Dick Dale’s double-picked and reverb-laden instrumental surf music that he pioneered as the 1950s ended and the 1960s began.
Town Hall Party ended in 1961, and so did the original run of the Collins Kids act. Lorrie decided to quit the road in 1961 after giving birth to her first daughter, and Larry hit the road on his own, touring every state fair and rodeo and country music opry show in the lower forty-eight states, Canada, and Alaska. Lorrie would come back in the mid-1960s and the “Kids” would re-form as a Vegas-Tahoe lounge act that lasted into the 1970s, but the original promise of stardom was long gone, and the two never released another record after 1959.
Larry kept active in the music business and scored two big hits as a songwriter, cowriting the massive hits “Delta Dawn” (originally a hit for Tanya Tucker, then Helen Reddy) and “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” (a big country hit for David Frizzell and Shelly West, featured in the Clint Eastwood film Any Which Way You Can, where Larry can briefly be seen playing guitar in a cameo role). Lorrie’s husband, Stu Carnall, managed several big country music artists, including Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. The Collinses kept on the periphery of the music business through that connection, staying friends with many of the top stars through the “outlaw country” era of the 1970s and 1980s.
When 1950s rockabilly music had a revival in the 1980s with the commercial success of the Stray Cats, many of the original 1950s artists began returning to the stage at European festivals. Originally Larry and Lorrie rebuffed their rediscovered-cult-hero status, even though their old records had now become rockabilly classics. Larry told an interviewer in 1990 that the only way the Collins Kids would reunite would be “if we could just find a midget to go out there and wear my old suits and jump around like a monkey.” Eventually, however, despite Larry’s protestations, a Collins Kids reunion would be inevitable. Their old music was just too good.
When I was in high school in Missouri, my local record store had a thin rockabilly section, and I relished every random new release that appeared in the bin. When a reissue album called Introducing Larry and Lorrie: The Collins Kids showed up, with vintage 1950s photos of the teenage pair wearing their flashy Nudie Western wear and Larry playing a wild looking custom-made Mosrite doubleneck guitar, I hastily proceeded to the checkout line with my new discovery. One of the football jocks at my high school was in line ahead of me (remember lines at record stores?), and when he saw me he asked, “What are you buying?” I showed him the Collins Kids reissue album (If my memory is correct, he was buying a Journey album), and he got the weirdest look on his face, as if I were a leper, a freak. It was a look I had grown accustomed to as a rockabilly outcast. Then again, I felt the same way about football jocks who bought Journey albums.
In 1991, shortly after moving to California, I discovered a $300 Mosrite doubleneck guitar in a pawnshop in Bakersfield. It was made in the 1960s, but it was similar to the ones that Joe Maphis and Larry Collins played in the 1950s. After borrowing the money from my then-singing partner Dave Stuckey, I made the instrument my visual trademark. I liked the fact that the doubleneck Mosrite had its roots with Joe Maphis and Larry Collins, and the fact that nobody else played one at that time made it unique. I used the doubleneck guitar with my band at the time, the Dave and Deke Combo, and we plied our craft singing rockabilly and hillbilly duets at various clubs in Southern California in the early 1990s. We made our first records and did a short tour of England in 1992.
One day, out of the blue, we got a phone call. The Collins Kids had finally acquiesced to a promoter’s offer, and agreed to reunite for the largest rockabilly festival in the world at that time, the Hemsby festival in England. The promoters had tried to think of who would be the right American band to back up Larry and Lorrie, brainstorming on several groups they thought might fit the bill. Eventually, acting under a suggestion by a young female English rockabilly fan named Vivien Wilson (now the owner of a famous designer clothing brand, Vivien of Holloway), the Hemsby promoters decided that the Dave and Deke Combo should get the gig. Vivien had seen me playing the same type of doubleneck Mosrite guitar that Larry played, and we were in close enough proximity to Reno to drive up and rehearse with them for the festival. We jumped at the opportunity. This was exciting! The Collins Kids were finally going to reunite, and we would be their backing band.
When we arrived in Reno for rehearsals, Larry and Lorrie were super friendly, funny, and engaging. We immediately began what would be a lifelong friendship. These were our 1950s rockabilly heroes, some thirty-five years after they made their great records. They were no longer child stars. Lorrie was then fifty years old, but had retained her great looks and singing voice, and still fit into her vintage 1950s custom Western dresses made for her by Nudie the Rodeo Tailor. Larry was no longer the diminutive child star he was in the 1950s. As a grown adult, Larry always reminded me of a cross between Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings. He wore a beard and feathered hair, and had a distinct fetish for turquoise concho belts and guitar straps.
Larry reveled in telling us great stories of the old days (“Elvis called me his ‘little cat’”; “We knew Eddie Cochran real well, he’d come down and play Town Hall Party and we’d jam backstage”; “When Merle Travis was barricaded in his house with a gun and his house surrounded by the police, Joe Maphis came by our house to get me, thinking that he’d send me in to talk to Merle. My dad objected, and Joe Maphis said ‘HE AIN’T GONNA KILL NO LITTLE KID! My dad said, HELL NO!’”; “One night Bob Wills was drunk and he wouldn’t go on, so they sent me into the back of his limo to try and talk him into performing. Bob Wills looked at me and said ‘ONE DAY, LARRY, YOU’LL KNOW!’ and then proceeded to puke all over my boots”). Larry grabbed his doubleneck Mosrite guitar out of the case and played the fire out of it. If anything, he was faster than he was in the 1950s. It was always a struggle to keep up with him. He was a force of nature.
When we arrived in England for the Hemsby festival, the Collins Kids’ appearance had all the mystique and official fanfare of a long-anticipated visit by foreign royalty. Eager fans showed up in droves to see if Larry and Lorrie could still deliver the goods on their old songs. By this point in time, most of the big 1950s rockabilly artists had already been to England and Europe multiple times. The Collins Kids were considered a huge “get” by the promoters, and the excitement to see them perform for the first time in decades was palpable. The evening of the concert, the Hemsby ballroom drew an estimated five thousand people to see the headliners. Backstage, before the show, Larry pulled a drag on a cigarette, looked at us, and said: “Well, let’s go TEAR ’EM A NEW ROCKABILLY!”
Although years had passed, the Collinses were true show-business professionals. In the glare of bright stage lights, they always smiled—they were taught from a young age to never stop smiling as long as the audience could see you. Although Larry was older and didn’t look like the young kid in those Town Hall Party videos, he danced around with his doubleneck like a man half his age. (Every now and then, when Larry and I were playing together, he’d be dancing with his guitar and he’d give me a look—that look I recognized from all those old videos. It was that same kid, with the same impish smile, behind the beard.) Lorrie sang great and looked absolutely spectacular; Larry played magnificently, shredding “Flyin’ Fingers” and “Hurricane” and “Rockin’ Gypsy.” They blew the roof off the place. It was an amazing show. They played every song the audience could have hoped to hear from them.
The Hemsby crowd went wild. To this day, it was the most overwhelming audience response I’ve ever witnessed—the closest thing to Beatlemania I’ve ever experienced. There were waves of heat coming off the audience, people screaming at the top of their lungs, yelling, waving their arms. Their music made people literally go crazy. I can’t remember if they did three or four encores, but the reunited Collins Kids, now adults, put on such a great show that the crowd simply refused to let them leave the stage. It was a great moment, and one I’ll always treasure.
Over the next twenty years, I got to back up Larry and Lorrie dozens of times, across the United States and Europe. They headlined rockabilly festivals all over the world. We played showcase shows at many venues. One humorous story I recall from a show we did in Seattle: a local writer, interviewing Larry in the backstage green room, kept asking about specific dates and incidents and recording sessions. Larry began to grow tired of the interviewer’s questions, and eventually pointed at us (the members of the Dave and Deke Combo) and let loose with another memorable line:
“Why don’t you ask those guys? They study this shit. All I did was LIVE IT.” We laughed about that line for years.
Larry and Lorrie also toured with other acts backing them up, but I was lucky to get the call to play with them on close to fifty occasions, with both the Dave and Deke Combo and my newer solo band, the Ecco-Fonics. The Collinses headlined my NAMM show, the Guitar Geek Festival, and brought along their young nephew Dakota to play bass. Larry and Lorrie even played at my wedding reception (my marriage didn’t last, but our friendship did).
High on the success of their reunion shows, Larry and Lorrie made one attempt at a comeback record in the 1990s that was never released. Its producer was a well-known San Francisco music journalist who shall go unnamed. His concept was to get Larry and Lorrie to make a roots-influenced, modern-sounding recording that could be played on commercial radio. A few sessions were recorded with a San Francisco band brought in by the producer, and they didn’t go well. Eventually the Dave and Deke Combo was asked to come in to the studio, since our live music collaborations with the Collinses had been so successful. As we attempted to play in our standard rockabilly style on some of the new songs, the writer-producer yelled at Larry and me to “stop doing that hillbilly CHET ATKINS THING.”
I had to think how misguided and sad it was that their producer had no idea of the West Coast country music guitar legacy sitting before him (or, even worse, his blatant contempt for it). The kid who once wore guitar giants Joe Maphis and Merle Travis around his neck, performing three-man duets on a single Mosrite doubleneck. The Chet Atkins reference showed this guy’s ignorance at such a deep level that Larry and I just looked at each other, Larry giving me a “bless his heart” eyeroll. It was as if the producer had hired a pair of highly experienced plumbers, then demanded that no matter what, they shouldn’t do any plumbing. Everything about the new recording project was a disaster, none of which was the fault of Larry and Lorrie. The whole thing was ill conceived. Once again, as had always been their curse, they were a little too rock ‘n’ roll for the country audience, and a little too country for the rock ‘n’ roll audience. The writer-producer was yet another in a long line of people who didn’t understand the magic that Larry and Lorrie could bring to the table simply by being themselves.
Their live shows, however, were always spot on, and the Collinses always gave it 110 percent. One particularly memorable moment happened at an outdoor concert at Lincoln Center in New York. The promoters had decided to allow the concert to go on as scheduled, despite pouring and blowing rain. As Larry and I stepped toward the edge of the stage for a guitar duet on “Rockin’ Gypsy,” we had to step past the vocal microphones into a puddle, with electrical cables submerged in several inches of water at our feet. The rain pounded us, soaking our clothes and our guitars. Larry looked over at me and laughed maniacally, with an expression on his face that reminded me of Indiana Jones. Still playing furiously, he yelled at me: “IT’S A GOOD DAY TO DIE!” He laughed some more and threw his head back into the rain. The Collins Kids had been through some serious shit in their lives, through years of being child stars who supported the rest of their family through constant touring. They played state fairs, rodeos, country music dives, Vegas casinos, and windowless, smoke-filled Tahoe lounges. A little water and electricity certainly weren’t going to stop them.
What did eventually stop them was Lorrie’s voice giving out, decades of cigarette smoking had finally taken their toll. Their last show as the Collins Kids was in 2012, and Larry went through a period of soul searching in the years to follow. He was still playing great, and he wanted to go out and play. He and Lorrie had been so close through the years, through the trials and tribulations, that they were virtually inseparable. They were like twins in their ability to read each other’s minds. When Larry was on his own, he never seemed to have the same confidence he had when he was with Lorrie. We played several festivals with Larry on his own, and the crowds still loved him. But it was clear that deep down, he greatly missed his older sister, the force and support system who had been beside him his entire life.
Larry released one new solo record during this time, with two new original songs. One was an anthemic rocker titled “Rockabilly Forever—Screw the Rest,” and the other was a jumpy rocker called “Bedtime Story Girl.” The sessions were done at my recording studio. My house is set up as a studio, with quite a few interesting music-related museum pieces scattered around as décor. One giant object that occupies a wall in the main live room of the studio is a 1959 Columbia Records Stereo Console, an eight-foot long, 320-pound behemoth that was gifted to singer Johnny Horton by his record label after his hit single “Battle of New Orleans” sold two million copies. I had bought the console stereo from a small-town museum in Louisiana that was closing, and spent considerable time and expense bringing the thing from Louisiana to California.
Larry arrived in his black leather motorcycle jacket adorned with conchos and studs and zippers and belts. Before I had a chance to catch him, He threw the jacket on top of Johnny Horton’s stereo console, putting a big scratch on the top. I started to admonish him about the damage to my historic furniture, but then I realized—hell, it was Larry Goddamn Collins, rockabilly legend, who put it there. I laughed about it and went on with the session. I knew that someday I’d look at that scratch as a memorable battle scar.
Lorrie passed away in 2018, after a period of bad health and a fall at her home in Reno. At the funeral, Larry seemed inconsolable, like a part of him had died inside. He performed solo at the funeral, and it was one of the saddest and most soul-scarred performances I have ever witnessed. Larry was devastated by Lorrie’s passing.
I only performed one more show with Larry after Lorrie’s death, a tribute show in Lorrie’s honor in Santa Ana. I was pleased that Larry finally got to meet and perform with Kyle Eldridge, a young kid on the scene who had taken on the mantle of performing in the Joe Maphis style. Larry seemed more frail, and his health wasn’t great. He performed his last show in 2019 at the Western Swingout festival in Tehachapi, California.
Larry and I kept in touch via phone. When he’d answer I would affect an Arkansas accent and tell him it was “Skeets” calling (a reference to Town Hall Party performer Enos “Skeets” McDonald), and Larry would respond back that he was “Jenks” (a reference to Town Hall Party performer Jenks “Tex” Carman). I interviewed Larry for the Merle Travis biography I wrote, and also interviewed him for a piece I wrote for the Please Kill Me website with my theory of how Larry’s 1958 song “Whistle Bait” was the first punk rock record. I honestly do believe that Larry’s two-chord grind on “Whistle Bait” may be the first instance of a rock ‘n’ roll song with no allegiance to the twelve-bar blues format or a country melody, just a simple riff with wild lyrics delivered with machine-gun speed and attitude (a hallmark of punk rock that came later).
Eventually Larry’s health deteriorated. His regular Facebook posts abruptly ended after years of staying in touch with his fans. Larry and I continued to text until seven or eight months ago. In the last few months, Larry was unable to respond to texts.
I suppose we all knew it was just a matter of time, but the news that Larry died on January 5 hit me hard. He was a friend, a mentor, and one of my biggest heroes. It didn’t seem like thirty years had passed since we first met and performed with Larry and Lorrie. There were incredible memories and lots and lots of great music made in those years. I will always treasure the time I got to spend around Larry and Lorrie. It’s hard to believe they’re both gone. I am sending condolences to his daughter Larissa, his nephew Dakota, and the rest of the Collins family, who were all there with him at the time of his death.
Looking now at the scratches on the top of Johnny Horton’s stereo record console, I’m glad they’re there. Larry Goddamn Collins, rockabilly legend, put them there. He was my friend and I’m going to miss him. May his memory be a blessing. Rest in peace, brother Larry.
