Country singer Ruthie Collins: ‘I didn’t think I was capable of a record deal’

Moving to Nashville, the Home of Country Music, to follow a dream, Ruthie Collins was surprised – and very grateful – that it came true.

Like Los Angeles, Nashville draws people to it in their thousands, most of them hoping to make it big in the entertainment industry.

They usually start off doing basic jobs while networking and trying to ‘get their foot in the door’, and that’s exactly what Ruthie, who was raised on a farm in Fredonia, NY, did while waiting for her ‘big break’.

“Yeah, I grew up in a little town and there’s no music scene there,” explains the singer-songwriter, speaking to the Cambridge Independent via Zoom from Nashville, “so I fell in love with country music in middle school and went to college and started kind of singing country then, and moved to Nashville eventually.

“And I honestly, not that I didn’t have the ambition, I just didn’t think that it would happen for me.

“I didn’t know anyone who did that, it seemed like way too big of a thing to happen to me. I moved here because I loved music and I just wanted to write songs…

“So I started waiting tables. I started a band with another girl that I waited tables with and we formed a duo together.

“The next thing I knew we were competing on one of those reality shows [Can You Duet] for a record deal and we came in sixth.

“And that was kind of the push that I needed, I think. It was like you wake up one day and you’re on a big stage on a national television show competing for a record deal – yet I don’t think I ever even believed that I was capable of getting a record deal.

“So that was really important for me, I was like, ‘Oh, maybe this is something that I can actually do – people will let me get away with this for a career!’”

Ruthie, who in 2011 was signed to the top record label Curb – home to the likes of Tim McGraw, LeAnn Rimes, and Hank Williams Jr – first came to the UK to perform in October 2020, but her shows were cancelled due to the lockdown and she ended up just doing livestreams.

She returned to play here “properly” in March 2022, appearing at the C2C Festival and doing a few gigs with fellow country singer Sam Outlaw.

Since then, a long-distance relationship with an Englishman has seen Ruthie return on a more regular basis – “probably six times in the last year and a half,” she says.

The talented artist has quite a selection of videos to enjoy on YouTube, and one of the most striking is the one for Joshua Tree, which was partly shot in room eight at the Joshua Tree Inn in the Joshua Tree National Park in California, the room in which country rock pioneer Gram Parsons died of a drug overdose 50 years ago.

“Yes, that was the hotel that Gram Parsons passed away in, and I went back a year after we shot that music video and stayed the night in that room, which was really cool,” says Ruthie.

The Joshua Tree was also immortalised, of course, in the 1987 U2 album of the same name. What is it that makes the place so special?

“I guess when I first got into country music it was in the late 90s, there was that big pop-country stuff, and then a few years later when I was in college, I discovered Emmylou Harris,” recalls Ruthie.

“I was really drawn to her – everything about her, her songwriting, just her presence, and I guess I’d heard her in some interview online, and still to this day I’m like ‘is this even a real story?’, because you never know…

“She was saying, or maybe the journalist was saying, that she never had a real true love after Gram and there was all this speculation that she was about to tell him that she was in love with him and then she said she didn’t want to tell him on the phone, she wanted to see him face-to-face and tell him – they were about to go back on the road.

“And then he passed away and she never got the chance, and I felt like I related to her music and her as a person so much, so when I heard that story it just really broke my heart. So I wrote the song about that.

“But when I wrote it, I had not been to Joshua Tree yet, so the first time I went was probably about five months after I wrote that song.

“It’s hard to explain, there’s really something in the air there – they describe it as like an energy vortex.

“I don’t know, but I’ve found that the energy there, your emotions are heightened – so if you’re really happy you’re super happy, if you’re sad you’re super depressed, and it really does seem like the kind of place where everything’s just a little heightened.

“And it’s just so strange-looking and the people there are really weird and cool... and then of course the park is just gorgeous. I still go back as often as I can.”

Ruthie, who has released a self-titled EP and two full-length albums, says she has been doing “a ton of writing in the last couple of years”, both on her own and with co-writers – including Matt Hodges, whom she’ll be performing with in Cambridge – and hopes to be in the studio by the end of the year.

“I’ve got it narrowed down to the top six,” she reveals. “It’s quite the process. I think I’ve written like 250 songs in the last year and a half – so quite a body of work to get through but we’re at the finish line so I’m so excited to get back in the studio.”

Other great tracks by Ruthie Collins include Get Drunk and Cry, Dang Dallas, Boys and Beaches, and Dear Dolly.

Expect to hear all these and more when she appears, alongside the UK’s Matt Hodges, as part of their Across the Pond tour, at The Portland Arms on Thursday, October 12.

[Read more: Lucy Grubb: Rising star of UK country/Americana scene heads to Cambridge Folk Club]

For tickets, priced £16.96, visit theportlandarms.co.uk/wp/.