Tommy Collins

Alongside Wynn Stewart, Tommy Collins ranked among the earliest country artists to shape a signature Bakersfield, California, style. Throughout the 1950s he issued a run of charting singles whose buoyant rhythms, playful lyrics, and amplified guitars softened the customary honky-tonk edge. His more introspective ballads retained an individual character as well: less refined than the countrypolitan productions emerging from Nashville, they nevertheless lacked the raw texture of classic honky-tonk. Numerous West Coast performers, notably Buck Owens—who supplied lead guitar on several of Collins’s successful releases—and Merle Haggard, later expanded upon the approach Collins had mapped out at the start of the decade. Collins himself never profited from the Bakersfield wave of the 1960s; having already stepped away from music once, he was then staging only a modest return. Even so, his impact remained pronounced, above all on Haggard, who carried “Carolyn” and “The Roots of My Raising” to the top of the charts in the early 1970s.

Born Leonard Raymond Sipes outside Oklahoma City, Collins spent his formative years in Oklahoma while his father served the county. He began singing and composing songs in childhood and soon performed on local radio broadcasts. After graduating high school in 1948 he enrolled at Edmond State Teachers College yet kept playing music, cutting a few sides for the California-based Morgan label. In the early 1950s he served briefly in the Army before relocating to Bakersfield alongside Wanda Jackson and her family. When the Jackson family returned to Oklahoma, Collins remained alone in Bakersfield.

He quickly forged friendships and professional ties there, striking up a close association with Ferlin Husky that led the two to share living quarters. After Husky recorded several of Collins’s compositions, he persuaded his own label, Capitol, to offer Collins a contract; the newcomer signed in June 1953 and adopted the stage name Tommy Collins for its commercial appeal. Capitol promptly assembled a studio band that included an as-yet-unknown Buck Owens on lead guitar. One unsuccessful single preceded the buoyant “You Better Not Do That,” which climbed to number two on the country chart for seven weeks in early 1954. Capitalizing on that momentum, Collins maintained a lighthearted, almost novelty-oriented course on the follow-ups that initially succeeded: three additional Top Ten entries—“Whatcha Gonna Do Now,” “Untied,” and “It Tickles”—appeared between the autumn of 1954 and the spring of 1955, while the fall 1955 double-sided release “I Guess I’m Crazy” / “You Oughta See Pickles Now” reached the Top 15. Meanwhile Faron Young scored a major hit with Collins’s “If You Ain’t Lovin’,” one of many songs the writer placed with other artists.

The rapid ascent halted abruptly after a religious awakening in early 1956 prompted Collins to record primarily sacred material that year, occasionally joined by his wife, Wanda Lucille Shahan. In 1957 he entered Golden Gate Baptist Seminary to train for the ministry and became a pastor two years later. Although he continued to record for Capitol during this period, neither artist nor label promoted the releases, and no hits resulted. When his contract lapsed in 1960 he ceased recording and enrolled at Sacramento State College, where he studied for the next two years.

Early in 1963 Collins concluded that the ministry left him unsatisfied, so he departed the church and returned to Bakersfield intent on resuming his musical career. Capitol re-signed him, and in 1964 the duet “I Can Do That” with his wife, Wanda, briefly appeared on the lower reaches of the charts. Assisted by Johnny Cash, Collins moved to Columbia in 1965; the following year he reached the Top Ten with “I Can’t Bite, Don’t Growl.” A succession of modest chart singles followed, none penetrating the Top 40. During the same span he toured as an opening act for his protégés Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. By the early 1970s his professional and personal circumstances neared collapse amid mounting struggles with drugs and alcohol; Wanda filed for divorce in 1971, plunging Collins into severe depression.

He began rebuilding by resuming songwriting, and several of the resulting compositions were recorded by Merle Haggard, including the 1972 number-one single “Carolyn.” In 1976 Collins relocated to Nashville and secured a deal with Starday Records; later that year he issued the album Tommy Collins Callin’, comprising his own renditions of songs he had supplied to others. Thereafter he concentrated almost exclusively on professional songwriting. Haggard’s 1981 tribute “Leonard” returned attention to Collins, who had by then achieved sobriety. He signed with Sawgrass Music, achieving his most visible success when Mel Tillis took “New Patches” into the Top Ten in 1984.

Collins maintained a low profile through the 1980s even as his catalog continued to be recorded; George Strait’s revival of “If You Ain’t Lovin’” reached number one on the country chart. European reissue labels such as Bear Family restored his early recordings to circulation, prompting an appearance at the 1988 Wembley Country Music Festival. In 1993 he entered a publishing agreement with Ricky Skaggs Music and continued writing professionally through the mid-1990s until his death at his home in Ashland City, Tennessee, on March 14, 2000.