Sam Collins (musician)

Collins was born in Louisiana and grew up in McComb, Mississippi, just across the state line.^[4] By 1924, he was performing in local barrelhouses, often with King Solomon Hill; both of them sang falsetto parts and played slide guitar.^[4] Collins's first recording in 1927 was "Yellow Dog Blues", made for Gennett Records and recorded in Richmond, Indiana. His bottleneck guitar was referred to as a "git-fiddle" on record labels of the time, and blues historian Robert Palmer noted that his guitar "seemed to literally weep".^[2]

Collins recorded again in 1931 for the American Record Corporation in New York; some of his later recordings appeared under different pseudonyms, such as Jim Foster on Champion records,^[3] Jelly Roll Hunter on Silvertone and Supertone records, Big Boy Woods and Bunny Carter on Bell Records, and Salty Dog Sam^[5]. For Collins himself this meant that even when his records sold, he often had no way of proving that he was the performer entitled to payment.^[5] His rural bottleneck guitar pieces were among the first to be compiled on LP.^[3]

In the late 1930s, Collins relocated to Chicago, where he died from heart disease in October 1949, at the age of 62.^[4]