If you rolled into a record store looking for a Stacie Collins record, you might be a little hard pressed deciding which bin to look in first.
Being raised in an apartment over a honky-tonk in Oklahoma as a child and pumping quarters into the jukebox to hear her childhood favorites like Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn, her music certainly as a country tint to it. Growing up as a teenager in Bakersfield, Calif., outside of Los Angeles, the hard rock that emanated from southern California throttled her impressionable mind. As her journey through music history brought her to the Chicago blues, she became so enmeshed with the Chicago blues harp styling of James Cotton that she decided to emulate and incorporate the harmonica into her playing.
The result is a hardcore female countrified blues player. Do you look in 'Blues,' 'Rock,' or 'Country'?
"There are country elements to what we do, so that lends itself to the country side, but conversely, we throw down. The live show is off the hook," Collins said. "It's a combination between The Rolling Stones meets Dwight Yoakam meet James Cotton. Now what the hell do you do with that, besides put it in your pipe and smoke it?
Collins has decided to make Nashville her headquarters