Photo by daughter Stephanie Sims
Samuel Lee Collins
Feb 25, 1941 – April 9, 2023
It pains my heart to write that on April 9, 2023 (Easter Sunday), my dear old friend, Sam Collins, shed his mortal coil and went to see Jesus at last. Sam was a true fighter to the bitter end, and hung onto life far longer than many would have predicted.
I have often said Sam Collins is the most honest man I’ve ever known — you always knew where he stood.
But this page is less about Sam’s passing than it is a celebration of his talents and devotion. Besides being a Christian, husband and father, in the world at large Sam was first and foremost a fine traditional Country music artist.
I had the privilege to share in Sam’s musical journey, off and on, over the course of 40 years or so. What follows is an assortment of my recollections of the one and only Sam Collins.
(Shortcut to this page: https://www.stringdancer.com/samcollins/)
“I’m Still Here”
on StringDancer Records
The final album release by Country music veteran Sam Collins is a compilation of Sam’s music, old and new. It features remastered vintage tracks from Sam’s 1981 LP, Alimony Blues (long out of print), plus four heartfelt, newly-recorded songs by Sam. From the liner notes I wrote for the project:
One day in early 2011, Sam called to say he thought he had some tunes left in him, and asked me to produce the tracks. I dubbed the project “The Millennium Sessions”, and the songs truly come from his heart: his mother’s favorite song (Suppertime, written by Ira F Stanphill); a tune written by his father, Oscar Collins (Memory Lane); a song written for Sam by his good friend Jimmie Skinner (A Boy They Call Lonesome); and a previously unrecorded tune Sam wrote back in the early days of his career (Turn Off The Night Lights).
Sam was intent on getting the music down, and between takes I could see the same old sparkle in his eyes I used to see back in the 1980s, when I played lead guitar in his band, cranking out one classic song after another in the rowdy, smoke-filled Country bars we played back then.
God only knows how many late-night sessions Sam has done over the years in Nashville TN and elsewhere… but none as poignant or meaningful to him as these, I’ll wager. It’s been my privilege to work and play on this CD, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it.
The Story of a Nashville Survivor
Anthology 2008
The history of Country music has no shortage of stories about talented men and women who gave everything they had in a quest for music, fame and fortune. Some of these stories are well-known to country fans because the artists in question eventually achieved great success. Other stories have either faded with the fortunes of the artists, or were never told to begin with — except perhaps by the artists themselves, their hard-core fans and family.
These seldom-heard tales provide the most interesting backdrop to the Country music experience. Stories of endless touring, playing long hours through crappy sound systems in rough, smoky honky-tonks, and the seemingly unavoidable drunken brawls, broken marriages, and unscrupulous managers, agents and record labels endured along the way (plus a host of other pitfalls) are told on bar stools, fishing boats and living room couches every day.
As often as not, these tales of musical aspiration, raucous good times and personal misfortune elicit a good belly-laugh. Sometimes the stories are heartwrenchingly sad. Other tales, frankly, will make a person stop and wonder at the sanity of people driven to give their all in pursuit of such a crazy dream. How is it someone would willingly subject themselves to the machinations of the industry, knowing the odds of success are so small? We may never know the answer to that one. But in the meantime, we can relish (and hopefully learn from) the stories of those who enjoyed a bit of fame, a memorable rush into the high-stakes world of commercial Country music, and lived to tell the tale.
My friend Sam Collins is from that generation of fine, old-school Country musicians. As in, back before Country became the genre where rock & roll went to die… back before pin-up potential supplanted singing skills and timeless tunes… back when “crossover” was something you did to a hill. Sam spent most of the 70s courting favor in MUSIC CITY — Nashville, Tennessee — rubbing shoulders with the stars, kicking back the whiskey and making music with some of Nashville’s best songwriters and performers, Including most of the original “outlaw” pack — Nelson, Jennings, Kristofferson, Cash, etc. Touring incessantly and working the powers that be were his lot in those days, and Sam lived the part to the fullest.
After many years of success (unfortunately grinding to a halt when his record label unceremoniously dropped him after he missed some road gigs due to a sudden health crisis), Sam made sure his band got all their money and returned to his home outside of Bloomington Indiana with only three thousand dollars to his name. He regrouped with local players and strived to build what might be called a normal life, staying close to hearth and home. He continued to gig around Indiana and Kentucky for many years, and retired from the biz sometime after 2010.
A ham-fisted fighter and hard-drinking partier in his day, Sam eventually gave up the sauce, took a seasonal job as a night watchman at Lake Monroe for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, and following the passing of his devoted wife, Polly, lived quietly in the Indiana hills long ago settled and inhabited by his family for generations, a hundred yards from Collins Lane.
Sam was a kind-hearted and generous man… but to the end, you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side. He was a God-fearing American who had zero tolerance for liars and cheats, and was well-known to hold strong opinions.
How it all began for me and Sam
Sam and I go way back to the early 80s, when he had just returned to his home in Bloomington Indiana after his extended dance with the Nashville machine. I was a local hired gun at the time, in and out of several bands, and during the day taught guitar and banjo and did instrument repairs at the old Guitar Gallery music shop on E. Kirkwood. Sam and I had met in the shop, and hit it right off.
It was a Friday afternoon, and his bass player had just quit the band. Sam walked into the shop and said in his decidedly Hoosier drawl, “Boy, I need a bass man for my band tonight and tomorrow night.”
“How much does it pay, Sam?” I asked. He responded, “Twenty-five bucks a night and all the beer you can drink”.
Always looking for something fun and different in my life as a musician (and also fond of free beer), I volunteered to do the gig. I borrowed a bass and amp from the store, made the gig… and my respect for bass players jumped several notches that weekend.
Thus began a long friendship. I was eventually promoted from bass to lead guitar (at one point playing twin guitars with a hot young shredder who would go on to considerable prominence in the Austin scene, David Grissom). When my stint in the band ended a couple years later (probably got hooked up in a new band, if I recall correctly), I saw Sam infrequently, and when I left Bloomington en route to my California daze in 1990, we fell out of touch.
REUNION — Upon returning to the area in 2006, Sam and I would reunite by chance at The Cabin, a blue-collar restaurant and lounge out on the 446 toward Lake Monroe. Sam was doing his DNR job as a night watchman at the FourWinds lake resort, and we had somehow come to the same watering hole at the same time. It was a delight to see my old buddy again, and it didn’t take long for us to put our heads together co-hosting an open-mic night at The Cabin, rekindling our mutual love for old-school Country. It was a great summer.
In more recent years I produced a couple of recording projects for Sam. In 2008 I digitized and remastered a CD anthology project of some of Sam’s classic Nashville TN recordings, and beginning in 2016 Sam and I recorded some tunes that meant a great deal to him, “for the archives”. These projects are chronicled below.
The Millennium Sessions
Sam said he thought he had a few of tunes in him, and asked me to produce the tracks. I was happy to oblige.
The first tune we cut, “Suppertime” (an Ira F Stanphill song made famous by Jim Reeve) was his mom’s favorite, and the second, “Memory Lane”, was written by his father, Oscar Collins.
We had some really fine players on these tracks, all old friends who used to play with Sam at one time or another. There was Del Sheets on bass and piano, Dave Jackson on pedal steel, Lanny Harmon and Rex Hunt played dobro and acoustic guitar, and I played some acoustic and electric guitars. Del co-produced with me, recording his wife and daughters Tracy, Martina and Delaney, on backup vocals in his Little Nashville Recording Studio.
My studio rig went mobile for these sessions, first setting up in Sam’s living room in 2011 for Suppertime, while the second tune, Memory Lane, was recorded in 2015 at our family’s lake house on Lake Lemon.
On the third tune in the series, A Boy They Call Lonesome, we took a little different tack. By this time my wife and I had bought our hilltop homestead on Greenbriar Lake outside of Nashville, and my studio gear was fully set up and ready for business.
Instead of assembling a bevy of friends to cut the tracks, I pulled up Band In A Box, the backing-track generating software by PG Music. Leveraging the talents of real Nashville musicians playing real instruments in a high-end studio environment, the program can whip up outstanding tracks in a matter of minutes for any song imaginable, in a wide variety of styles.
While there’s no substitute for the good camaraderie of a bunch of buddies coming together to make a recording, budget and time constraints can also be factors in the approach one takes to a project. Bringing BIAB to the task decreased production time and cost radically, and the results speak for themselves, I think.
Sam’s final recording is a song he had written in the old Nashville days called Turn Off The Nightlight that he had never gotten around to capturing on tape..
The Millennium Sessions were a lot of fun, but not easy on old Sam. His once booming tenor was now a tenuous baritone, and years of hard living had taken a toll on his once formidable endurance. But Sam was intent on getting the music down, and between takes I could see the sparkle in his eyes I used to see back when I played in his band, cranking out one classic song after another in the rowdy, smoke-filled country bars we played back then. God only knows how many late-night sessions Sam has done over the years in Nashville, Tennessee and elsewhere, but none was more poignant or meaningful to him than these, I’ll wager. We had hoped to add more tunes to the playlist… alas, time was not on our side.
BLAST FROM THE PAST
Sam Collins Anthology 2008
Sam and I had been talking about digitizing some of his old LP and 45 releases for quite some time. Early in 2008, we decided to tackle the project in earnest.
As I hadn’t owned a turntable for years, Sam managed to acquire one for me. I bought and installed a fresh needle, and hooked up the unit to my iMac to digitally rip the tracks. At that point I ran the tunes individually through Logic Pro X, tweaking them as best I could to enhance the sound.
Fortunately, the copy he provided of his 1981 LP, Alimony Blues, was in fine shape, and I was able to create fairly clean reproductions of the tunes. His small stack of 45s proved to be considerably rougher, but I did my best to record them with as little needle noise as possible.
Long out of print, these recordings are now only available here in StringDancer.
Tracks from Sam’s 1981 album, Alimony Blues
Ripped from the original LP and digitally remastered in 2008. Video produced in 2017.
- 1 – Alimony Blues
- 2 – In A Booth In The Back
- 3 – Marianne The Housewife
- 4 – Right Back Where I Started From
- 5 – I’m Still Here
- 6 – Hard Times
- 7 – Train To Louisville
- 8 – Be Thankful
- 9 – Sleeping Beauty
- 10 – Pour The Wine
Additional 45 rpm tracks included on the CD, Anthology 2008
11 – Mr. Auctioneer
12 – Distant Drums
13 – Last Letter
14 – Memories of 43
15 – Next Greyhound Going Home
16 – Traveling Man
But that’s not all!
Just when I thought I’d seen it all from Sam, one day he really surprised me — he decided to fulfill an old boyhood dream and skydive out of a perfectly good airplane! The souvenir video documented it all, and I did some minor video editing after the fact.
Sam’s Final Days
Sam Collins lived hard, no question about it. Besides the typical drugs and alcohol that went along with being a driven, hard-working traveling musician in the ’70s, over the course of his 82 years he also survived numerous bar fights, street brawls, knife and gun attacks, and enough health challenges to have taken out a weaker man by the age of 50. In a way, being kicked to the curb by the Nashville music machine probably saved his life. Returning to Indiana gave his body and mind time to heal, and being with his family in the same area he knew as a boy offered Sam the grounding he couldn’t achieve with all the constant touring imposed upon him by his handlers. While his bitterness toward the music industry took a long time to subside, his humble beginnings and unshakable faith in the Lord were a source of strength.
A naturally robust man, he suffered and overcame numerous health challenges over the years. In the end, it wasn’t any single ailment that quenched his spark, but a lifetime accumulation of issues. Rhonda and I visited him several times towards the end of his life, and during his last stay in hospital prior to being released into home hospice (under the doting care of daughter Stephanie Sims and other family members), I walked in and said, “How ya doing, old son?” He matter of factly said, “I’m dying”, without a trace of remorse. While his speech was a little slurred and he winced occasionally with pain, he was still sharp as a tack. At one point someone said something about his condition, and Sam retorted, “I’m sick, not stupid!”
During our next-to-last visit on the day before his passing, he was bedridden and struggling to breathe. But with a little nudging he recognized that Rhonda and I were by his side, and he whispered, “I been waiting on you”. Later he said, “I’m going home now”. He told Stephanie that he had traveled to Heaven and saw family members and his wife Polly, who was wearing a green dress, and was told to hang on just a bit, it wasn’t quite his time.
On Easter Sunday 2023 around 6:30pm,the phone rang, and we saw it was Stephanie calling. We knew immediately what it meant… Sam had just passed on, and we were among the first calls she made. I’ll be honest — while aggrieved, we were all relieved as well. Sam had been suffering his final days mightily, dying as hard as he had lived. He clung to this world like the champion he was, even while longing for the next.
As I write this on April 13, 2023, I’m preparing myself to put on my new black suit and grab the CD I had assembled of Sam’s music (laced with some of my own that Sam enjoyed) to be looped at his memorial services. Afterwards, I’ll be helping to bear Sam’s casket to its final resting place in Mt. Gilead Cemetery just a mile from the old Collins homestead, to be buried next to Polly at last.
This is gonna be a two-handkerchief day, I think. — REST IN PEACE, OLD SON.
Sam Collins is one of my oldest and dearest friends in the world,
and this webpage is my tribute to a man I greatly respect and love dearly.
I trust that love has been revealed in my words.
So long as StringDancer is online, Sam’s music will live on. ~~JF
