WHAT: The Collins Kids with Deke Dickerson & The Ecco-Fonics
WHERE: Oneida Casino Lounge, Green Bay
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 9-11
INFO: oneidabeingoandcasino.net

>>WIM: Lorrie Collins
WOMEN IN MUSIC

WHAT: The Collins Kids
with Deke Dickerson & The Ecco-Fonics
WHERE: Oneida Casino Lounge, Green Bay
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 9-11
INFO: oneidabeingoandcasino.net

Maybe you don’t know the name Lorrie Collins or The Collins Kids. In rockabilly circles that would make you a square, man, because Lorrie and her little brother Larry are rockabilly superstars.

“Our rockabilly music was out there before anybody ever heard of Elvis,” Lorrie said.

They were TV stars in the very earliest days of rock ‘n’ roll, straight off a dairy farm in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lorrie had a big voice that could belt it out like no one else of her time – at least no little white girl – and Larry, two years her junior, brought the house down as he bounced around the stage and ripped out fiery licks on his double-necked Mosrite guitar. They made rock look like child’s play. And they enraged a conservative Christian population who saw this newfangled music of the early 1950s as the devil’s work.

“It is a wonderful story, good and bad, I guess,” Lorrie said by telephone from her Nevada home. “Music began for me with my mother’s family. She had several sisters and they all had wonderful musical ability. Not only could they all play instruments, but they all had great voices. Being around that and being urged to join in every Sunday when they’d come to our house after church and sit around on the front porch and play music. That was our recreation. That’s how it all started. It rubbed off on me and I loved it”

Lorrie said her mother had musical aspirations that never came to fruition, which is probably why she was so quick to support Lorrie’s own musical dream.

“I was 9 years old when I realized music is what I wanted to do,” Lorrie said.

Most kids have dreams of becoming something, but how many actually make it happen?

“My wish was that we could go to California, and I could audition and see if my voice and music would work there,” Lorrie said. “My dad was not keen on going to California, but there was a show called Louisiana Hayride. It featured most every week Hank Williams and Johnny Horton and people like that. Louisiana was closer than California, so my dad said, ‘Let’s go there and see what they think, and if it’s worth our while, we’ll go to California.’

“So Dad sold a couple cows and we just went there,” she continued. “We didn’t talk to anyone on the phone first. We didn’t have a phone. We just went here. We went to the back stage door. I was all dressed up in my western suit. I think the stage door man assumed I was on the show. He let us in, and we just asked to see the man that ran the show. He came out and we went into a dressing room.”

Remember, this is a 9-year-old girl.

“Basically, I did all the talking,” Lorrie said. “I told him I loved singing and wanted to do it professionally and would he listen to me. So he did. The next thing I knew I was on stage singing to a live audience. I did get to meet Hank Williams. When I came off the stage he was standing to the side and he told me and my parents what I great job I did and how much talent I had. It revved me up and my mom. I don’t know about my dad. It took some time to convince him. But we were relentless and he finally gave in.

“He sold some more cows, bought an old, beat up car and we headed to California to live with my aunt,” Lorrie said.

By now Lorrie is 10 and Larry is 8. He has begun playing a $12 Stella guitar he got for Christmas.

“He knew exactly what to do right away,” Lorrie said of Larry and his first guitar. “Then he started singing. My dad got sick of hearing us rehearse in different rooms, so he said, ‘Why don’t you just do something together?’”

Once they had an act together, they auditioned for a country show broadcast Saturday nights out of Los Angeles called Town Hall Party. The year was 1953.

“We auditioned on Friday and the man that ran the show just loved us, so the next day we were on television,” Lorrie said. “It really did happen just that fast for us. We had no clue how much time it was supposed to take. We were just chomping at the bit to do our music. We loved California and wanted to stay there.”

Lorrie was blowing everyone away with her big voice and Larry was making a name as an 8-year-old guitar prodigy.

“Trust me, he could play the guitar like nobody’s business at 8 years old,” Lorrie said. “It just flabbergasted everyone. We were on the show with Joe Maphis and Merle Travis, two of the greatest guitar players who ever lived, and they were absolutely mesmerized by Larry’s ability. They could show him a lick and he’d have it down in a matter of minutes.”

One day a young guitar maker by the name of Semie Moseley gave Maphis a custom three-necked guitar.

“The weight of it was so heavy that no one would have been able to stand up and play it for any length of time,” Lorie said. “He went back and redid it and came back with the double neck and history was made. He gave one to Joe. Then he made one for Larry.”

The Collins Kids were still pre-teens when Columbia Records signed them.

“We started doing network television shows such as Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Arthur Godfrey, Dean Martin. If there was a major network show, Larry and I were doing it. We became a little more polished. They sent me to charm school in Hollywood. Had our teeth fixed. At that time, I was maturing and growing up a little bit faster than Larry. He was still a little kid. Adorable. Everybody loved him.”

Lorrie, however, was growing up and started to feel the pressure of being one of the very few females, and certainly the youngest, singing rock ‘n’ roll.

“I think during my time in the music business, it was as hard as it gets for women. It was a man’s world then,” she said. “At that time, a lot of people felt women shouldn’t be doing our kind of music, which is rockabilly music. The songs were basically sexy and it wasn’t the thing to do for an adult woman, let alone someone my age. So it was really difficult and sad in a way. I didn’t want to let anybody down. I felt put in the middle. We caught a lot of flak from churches and different groups that thought I shouldn’t be singing seductive songs. But I wanted to be true to myself and do my music.”

Lorrie said to them their music was just an extension of the gospel singing they had done in church and the family sing-alongs on the porch. “It was that same music with a beat,” she said. “It just seemed like a natural thing for us to do.”

That’s why it hit Lorrie hard when a hometown minister criticized her during a church service.

“We went back to visit family and one of the ministers at our church in Oklahoma put me in tears when he aid from the pulpit how great our talent was but how we should be singing for the lord and not for the devil. Needless to say, we didn’t go back to that church. My parents were furious and I was just in tears. Larry didn’t pay that much attention to it because he was young and it wasn’t really aimed it him. It was aimed at me.”

But it wasn’t all difficult. “It was also a wonderful time,” Lorrie said.

“Larry and I feel blessed to have lived in that era. Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Rick Nelson and all those guys were friends of ours and would come over to the house for dinner. It was just a real great time in American music.”

The Collins Kids called it quits in the 1970s. Larry continued a songwriting career that produced “Delta Dawn” and “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” and Lorrie raised two daughters and got into real estate. Rockabilly became a museum piece in America, but not in Europe and Asia.

“The promoters in Europe kept calling us to do shows,” Lorrie said. “Well, I wanted to go but Larry didn’t want to do it. Finally I said, ‘Let’s just do it once and we don’t ever have to do it again.’”

That was in the early ’90s at an English rockabilly festival.

“It was a blast and we were hooked,” Lorrie said. “Now we do a few select shows a year. We just got back from England where we did a rockabilly rave. They had 8,000 people come to this thing from all sides of the globe. And we’re going to do three shows in Green Bay with Deke Dickerson and his band. We’re just thrilled and delighted to be able to do more than one show there so we’ll be able to meet more of our fans and spend a little more time with them.”