Lorrie Collins with Ricky Nelson on The Nelsons.
Lawrencine May “Lorrie” Collins (May 7, 1942 – August 4, 2018) was an American country, rockabilly and rock and roll singer. Beginning in the mid-1950s, she and her brother, Larry Collins, performed as the Collins Kids.
Born in Creek County, Oklahoma, near Sapulpa, Collins and her brother Larry were individually musically talented as young children. Their parents relocated them to Southern California to further develop their music. They soon became paired as a musical duo.
In the late 1950s, Collins was the girlfriend of television star and teen idol Ricky Nelson on both the Nelson family’s top-rated show The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet and in private life. She made her debut on January 22, 1958 in an episode entitled “The Picture in Rick’s Notebook” in which she played the dual role of twin sisters (one being David Nelson’s girlfriend and the other Ricky’s potential paramour). In this first episode, Nelson and Lorrie performed a duet of “Just Because”, which had been one of the Collins Kids’ signature songs (Lorrie played her own guitar and covered the name “Collins” on the neck with her left hand). A month later, her brother made a guest appearance on the show in an episode entitled “Who is Betty?”, which aired on February 19, 1958.
In 1959, when Collins was 17, she married Stu Carnall, who was Johnny Cash’s manager and twice her age. She continued acting and singing with Nelson on television and recording and touring with her brother until 1961 when she gave birth to her first child. The Collins duo continued to perform into the 1960s, appearing as regulars in the 1963 Canadian music series Star Route, and later made appearances on The Jackie Gleason Show and The Hollywood Palace as late as 1967. 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.
With her brother, Collins is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.
She and her brother performed together again in 1992 and 1993, mostly at music festivals.
Collins died on August 4, 2018, at the age of 76.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorrie_Collins
Addendum:
The Collins siblings continued to perform together in the mid-1960s, appearing as regulars on the Canadian music program Star Route and making a guest appearance on the 8 September 1965, edition of Shindig!.
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 duo reunited for a rockabilly revival concert in England in 1993 and performed together until Lorrie’s death in 2018. They appeared at Deke Dickerson’s Guitar Geek Festival in Anaheim, California, on January 19, 2008, with their nephew, Dakota Collins, playing upright bass as a new addition to the Collins band.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collins_Kids
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Other Notable Musicians’ Deaths…
August 2018
7: Carlos Almenar Otero, 92, Venezuelan singer and songwriter/ Vicki Archer, 41, British radio DJ (BBC Radio Shropshire); Étienne Chicot, 69, French actor (The Da Vinci Code) and composer; Guilherme Lamounier, 67, Brazilian singer-songwriter, composer and actor (The Sandpit Generals), pneumonia.
5: Navid Izadi, 32, American DJ and hip hop artist, plane crash; Majid Al-Majid, 52, Saudi folk singer, shot; Ellen Joyce Loo, 32, Canadian-born Hong Kong singer (at17), fall.
4: Lorrie Collins, 76, American rockabilly singer (The Collins Kids); Donald Hunt, 88, British choral conductor; Anar Nagilbaz, 44, Azerbaijani rapper, songwriter and actor, internal hemorrhage.
3: Bradley Daymond, 48, Canadian dance musician (Love Inc.) and producer, cardiac arrest; Tommy Peoples, 70, Irish fiddler (The Bothy Band).
2: Neil Argo, 71, American composer (Wild America, Mission: Impossible), heart failure.
1: Jan Kirsznik, 84, Polish rock saxophonist; Celeste Rodrigues, 95, Portuguese fado singer; Hasanaga Sadigov, 67, Azerbaijani ashik musician, cancer; Jalees Sherwani, Indian screenwriter and lyricist; Umbayee, 66, Indian ghazal singer, cancer.