“Devil In The Lion’s Den” - Sam Collins (1927)
First of all I must apologize for the lack of update yesterday but my wife and I spent a portion of yesterday in the hospital thinking that she was going to deliver our second child a little earlier than expected (May 29th is Baby Clare’s due date).
Sam Collins was born on August 11, 1887 in the state of Louisiana though he grew up just across the border in McComb, Mississippi. By 1924 he was performing in local barrelhouses, often with King Solomon Hill with whom he shared the use of falsetto singing and slide guitar. He was first recorded by Gennett Records in 1927. Sam Collins’s professional recording career would consist of just four sessions in all, three in 1927 (April, September, and December) and one in October of 1931. Sometime in the 1930’s Collins, following the flow of African-American migrant workers from Mississippi northward, relocated to Chicago, Illinois. Sam Collins died of heart disease in Chicago on October 20, 1949.
I really like Sam Collins. He wasn’t the greatest or the most popular of the early blues artists. He was a capable but not outstanding guitar player and his singing, while expressive, is not in the league of contemporaries like Sleepy John Estes. Yet Sam Collins possessed something else, something intangible that I have never been able to put my finger on. He just made really good music.
“Devil In The Lion’s Den” was recorded in April of 1927. Although the song was recorded for “Gennett Records”, Gennett frequently leased it’s recordings out to other record lables for release. As far as I can surmise from my research Sam Collins’s “Devil In The Lion’s Den” was released by the “Black Patti” label with Collins being billed as “Crying Sam Collins And His Git-Fiddle”, the “Crying” part of the title probably derived from his high, expressive singing voice.
