The Collins Kids were an American rockabilly duo featuring Lawrencine "Lorrie" Collins (May 7, 1942 - August 4, 2018) and her younger brother Lawrence "Larry" Collins (born October 4, 1944).
Their hits in the 1950s as youngsters, such as Hop, Skip and Jump, Beetle Bug Bop and Hoy Hoy, were geared towards children, but their infectious singing and playing crossed over generations.
Larry, a lightning-fingered guitar whiz at age 10, was known for playing a double-neck Mosrite guitar like his mentor, Joe Maphis.
The opening of today's blog post gets things started with a great article on Larry Collins from the Please Kill Me site: The Kid Who Recorded The First Punk Rock Record (and Influenced Surf Guitar) by Deke Dickerson
"It’s always a little pretentious when some expert on the internet proclaims something to be the first, the origin, the beginning, of a music genre. America’s rich tapestry of music, after all, was formed by a bunch of tiny threads that all interwove to form something beautiful.
Contrary to popular opinion, Jimmie Rodgers didn’t invent country music, but he was the first to sell a bazillion records and show a lot of people what country music sounded like. No, Elvis didn’t invent rock and roll, but was the first to take raw black music out of the clubs and expose it to millions of consumers. No, Blue Cheer didn’t invent heavy metal, but they did somehow manage to be the loudest band in the world at a very important crossroads in both culture and music in the late 1960s. The list goes on and on, and in the sphere of influence these artists can’t be denied, even if they didn’t really invent whatever it is they’re credited with inventing.
When I was young, we were told the Ramones, or the Sex Pistols invented punk rock. If you got into debates with record collectors, many thumped their chests and insisted that punk was invented by the Dictators, or Iggy and the Stooges, or (in Lester Bangs’ estimation) with the 1960s garage band groups, such as the Count V and their warped Psychotic Reaction from 1966. Depending on how you defined ‘punk,’ any of these answers might be correct.
In my opinion, however, the very first punk rock record was a strange little ditty called Whistle Bait, recorded by 13-year old Larry Collins in 1958.
Larry and his sister Lorrie were Okies who moved to Southern California with their family in the first half of the 1950s, looking for their own piece of the American dream. Lorrie was one of the best-looking women in history, and the fact that she had an amazing, mature singing voice in her early teens made her a shoo-in for show-biz success.
Larry was a precocious little kid who played guitar and sang and was tremendously talented and full of youthful energy…When Larry and Lorrie (now renamed The Collins Kids) got hired on as regulars on the popular Los Angeles live country music television show Town Hall Party, Larry (9 years old at the time they joined the show) was mentored by two of the greatest guitarists in American music history—Joe Maphis and Merle Travis.
Joe’s huge, unwieldy custom-built Mosrite doubleneck guitar was his signature instrument, and by 1956 Larry had one built for him, too. Although the doubleneck Mosrite was one of the heaviest and most cumbersome guitars ever built, the visual impact of Joe Maphis and Larry Collins on dueling doublenecks was pure electricity on live television of the era.
Joe Maphis was the Eddie Van Halen of his day—fast, fleet-fingered, dizzying—but by 1956 the 11-year old Larry Collins was no slouch, either. He could play the living hell out of that doubleneck Mosrite guitar, all the while dancing and jumping around like an escaped monkey on helium, literally running circles around his sister, singing harmonies and backing her up on guitar.
The Collins Kids were signed to Columbia Records, along with many of the Town Hall Party cast (Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, Freddie Hart, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Bond). Columbia tried pushing the Kids into a corny kiddie corner with pre-teen novelty material like Hush Money and Oh Ma, Won’t You Make Him Behave, but as early as 1955, Larry and Lorrie were among the first white acts on the West Coast to play rock and roll music.
Columbia Records didn’t really know what to do with them, and label honcho Mitch Miller famously hated rock and roll. Eventually, the businessmen at Columbia knew they had to do something to compete with Elvis Presley’s sales, and The Collins Kids were allowed to cut more rocking material. Some of the resultant recordings by Larry and Lorrie are among the best rockabilly records of the era, with an undeniable high energy charm complete with hot guitar licks and hot vocals. Hop, Skip, and Jump, Hoy Hoy, Mercy, Hot Rod and (Let’s Have A) Party were all solid killers, and probably would have been hits if Columbia had known how to promote them properly.
In retrospect, The Collins Kids were considered a little too hillbilly for the rock and roll crowd (they always dressed in rhinestone Nudie suits, the de facto ornamentation for country stars of the era) and too rock and roll for the hillbilly crowd—though the West Coast country music people seemed to be much more receptive to rock and roll than their Nashville counterparts.
One of the great things about living in the modern era is that we have so much of this archival footage at our fingertips. Just go to YouTube and do a search for ‘The Collins Kids,’ and you’ll be treated to hundreds of vintage clips that bring their whole 1950s magic to life, more vividly than any words I can write here.
A clip of Larry performing the Duane Eddy instrumental “Ramrod,” became somewhat of a viral hit a year ago, accumulating several million views, which goes to show that good schtick is good schtick, regardless of when it was made.
In addition to influencing the invention of surf guitar, Larry was an unstoppable whirling dervish, the most visually memorable part of the Town Hall Party television show. The kid had so much energy, watching him today makes you marvel at how good he was at such a young age, while simultaneously filling you with the impulse to slap him to get him to settle down. Knowing the backstage environment of country music’s stars of the 1950s, I had to wonder—were they giving this kid drugs? Why was he jumping around like that?
Larry remembers: “We toured with Johnny Cash, Gordon Terry, Merle Travis, all those guys, legendary hell raisers, so I saw all that. It was all around us. There was alcohol, there were pills, and cigarettes—God, I can still remember that smell. Bob Wills once vomited on my cowboy boots! But no, I wasn’t on pills. I never did that stuff.
‘They said I came out of my mama with one leg shakin’. They thought I was crazy! I had so much energy they didn’t know what to do with me. When I started playing guitar, they just said, now he’s got somewhere to focus all that energy. It’s a good thing I never did any of those drugs, if I had, I think my heart would have exploded. I was already flyin’ all on my own. I couldn’t keep still!’
At this point, many of you readers, accustomed to clickbait articles built around a gnat’s attention span, are wondering: What does this have to do with punk rock?
It came out of nowhere—the first punk rock record—a raw slice of energy, teenage angst, and pure hormonal overdrive. Released in 1958 as a Collins Kids record but featuring a solo vocal by Larry, the record was called Whistle Bait.
Whistle Bait was the first rock and roll record to divorce itself from rhythm and blues, or country, or jazz, or anything. It was like nothing that came before it. Call it pure Id, call it free association rockabilly, call it the by-product of cheeseburgers and the inhalation of gas fumes with lead additive, but it was just a really weird record. It was the first punk rock record. When Whistle Bait was released was not destined to be a hit."
Within a year, Larry and Lorie joined the cast of the weekly country music showcase on Los Angeles television in 1954.
The Collins Kids became regular performers on Town Hall Party in 1954 and on the syndicated for television version of the show, Tex Ritter's Ranch Party, which ran from 1957 to 1959. It was on Town Hall Party that Ricky Nelson first saw Lorrie Collins, and soon after they began dating. In a 1958 episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Lorrie played both Ricky's girlfriend - and that girlfriend's identical twin.
The Collins Kids hits in the 1950s included Hop, Skip and Jump, Beetle Bug Bop, and Hoy Hoy. The Collins Kids became regular performers on Town Hall Party in 1954,appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, and on the syndicated for television version of the show, Tex Ritter's Ranch Party in the late 1950s.
Collins and his mentor, country star Joe Maphis, recorded an album together for Columbia Records, titled Fire on the Strings, released in 1957.
In the mid-1960's, The Collins siblings continued to perform together as they began appearing as regulars on the Canadian music program Star Route and making a guest appearance on the 8 September 1965, edition of Shindig!.
Many of their performances on Town Hall Party were released on DVD by Bear Family Records of Germany; a CD of their work on the show, Rockin' on T.V., was released in 1993 on the Krazy Kat label in Europe.
Larry wrote a number of well-known songs including Delta Dawn, You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma, Tulsa Turnaround; some in partnership with songwriter Alexander Harvey.
The Collins siblings continued to perform together until 1961 when they separated. The duo reunited for a rockabilly revival concert in England in 1993. They appeared at Deke Dickerson's Guitar Geek Festival in Anaheim, California, on 19 January 2008, with their nephew, Dakota Collins, playing upright bass as a new addition to the Collins band. The Collins Kids performed together until 2018.
Larry Collins passed away died of natural causes in Santa Clarita, California, on January 5, 2024.
In 1959, when Lorrie was 17, she married Stu Carnall, who was Johnny Cash's manager and twice her age. She is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. Sadly,
Lorrie Collins died in 2018.
Revered by rockabilly fans and collectors the world over, their filmed television appearances and recordings are testimony to the fact that the Collins Kids weren't just "good for their age," they were just plain good...Amen
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