Local country music singer celebrates 50 years in the business
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Colleen Kay Gallagher and her husband Jim are looking forward to performing at her “50th Anniversary – A Night of Musical Memories,” being held at 7 p.m. Saturday at Truman Auditorium in Farmington.
Colleen Kay Gallagher was born and raised in Bonne Terre, attended school in the North County School District, and she’s probably rubbed shoulders and performed on stage with more country music stars than almost anybody else in the Parkland.
The singer in the early days of her country music career.
So, how does a girl who grew up in a down-to-earth, nothing special, southeast Missouri family end up friends with some of the biggest stars and songwriters in Nashville? To find out the answer to that question, we have to go back to Gallagher’s childhood.
“When I was five years old, I sang at home with my brothers,” she recalled. “My brother Larry would teach me lyrics to songs, and my brother Randy played guitar, so we started singing together. Mom and Dad were dancers. They loved country music. We all did. So, at one point, my mom and dad had met this fella who was a bass player in a band up in Arnold.
They said, ‘We’ve got a little girl here that she can sing.’ So, he said, ‘Why don’t you bring her up?’ I was eight years old at that point. They took me to the Chaparral Club up in Arnold, and I sang with them. That kind of started it at that point. I started singing with them every weekend. They gave me five dollars, and Mom and Dad would drive me up there. We traveled all over the place with them.”
Gallagher, a big fan of country music legend Loretta Lynn, talked about wanting to meet her idol in the flesh.
“Three months later, she and Conway Twitty was in St. Louis,” she said. “I told my mom and dad, ‘I want to meet Loretta Lynn.’ You don’t realize when you’re a kid that you can’t just walk up and meet somebody. So, Mom and Dad took me to Kiel Auditorium up in St. Louis.
“We stood outside by her bus. It was in between shows. We didn’t have money for tickets, but Mom and Dad stood out there with me. At one point, an old cowboy came up to us, and he told my mom, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but this little girl is going to freeze to death out here. It’s cold.’ It was spitting snow. And she said, ‘Well, she wants to meet Loretta Lynn.’”
Gallagher was wearing a special outfit for her hoped-for meeting with her idol and didn’t want to keep her coat on because she wanted Loretta Lynn to see it if she happened to look out the window of her travel bus.
“The man asked me, ‘You want to meet Loretta Lynn? Well, I’ll tell you what, come here inside the building. Let’s get you warm.” So he took us in through the backstage door. We didn’t realize until later that he was Loretta’s husband, Mooney.
Colleen Kay Gallagher with her idol, Loretta Lynn.
“He came back a few minutes later, and he took me and my mom on the bus. We got to meet Loretta Lynn, and then she wanted to hear me sing, so I sang a couple of songs. It’s funny. You don’t have good sense when you’re eight years old — I sang ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ to her. Then she asked me if I’d sing a couple of songs that weren’t hers. So, I sang a couple of other songs, and then she ended up telling me she wanted me to sing on the show that night with her — there at Kiel Auditorium, where she was going to be singing at two sold-out shows.
“I don’t know if I’d have followed through with it if I’d not been with her and all that. She kind of started something. We built a friendship with her. I got to know her family. I used to hang out with her twins and all that good stuff. They’re a year older than me, so we got to be pretty good friends. Through that, it just kind of grew.
As time went on, Gallagher’s career began to grow.
“I would travel whenever I could,” she said. “I was still in school. We’d travel on weekends and summers. My mom was really good at getting connections to get shows and things booked. So, I ended up just kind of building a career from that. I stayed here through high school, and after I got out of high school, I went on the road. My first road band was a band called Brickey’s Pass. They were based out of St. Genevieve.
Colleen Kay Gallagher with country music great Earnest Tubb.
“I didn’t really know them that well, but I ended up going on the road with them. That was my first job as a bass guitarist. I’ve played bass since I was in high school. So, I went to work with them for a couple of years. From there, I moved to Nashville. I stayed down there for a few years and worked for a couple of songwriters — Max D. Barnes and his son, Max T. Barnes. They had 33 number ones that they wrote in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s.”
The songwriters had Gallagher perform on demos of their songs and tried to help her get a record deal.
“It was a competitive business,” she said. “So, I worked down there for a long time, and then I ended up coming back here in 1989, but still with traveling and going back and forth down there. I went to work — got a day job, and still played on weekends. We traveled whenever we could. Then, I went to work for the Plummer family around 1998.
“They wanted me to go to work for them in Branson, but I was in Nashville at the time. So, I ended up going to work for them. They were family friends. We’ve known them all our lives. I went to work with them for seven or eight years, something like that. Then, of course, they closed all their stuff down, and they retired.”
The young singer started a band with her husband, Jim, who played the drums.
“Along with my brother Randy, we started a band called Route 67,” she said. “That’s been going on for 23 years, but we still go back to Nashville, and we still travel with Max T. Barnes. He’s had Diamond Rio hits, George Jones hits, and John Anderson hits. I mean, he just had tons of them.
One of the songs his dad wrote that they were trying to get me a record deal with was a song called ‘Don’t Tell Me What to Do.’ That was like in 1988. I recorded it. When I came back in ’89, it ended up getting recorded by Pam Tillis. It was her first number-one hit. She learned it off my demo.”
“We travel all over the United States, and we’ve gone with Max several times to Ireland,” she said. “He takes us all over the United States. We still do some local stuff with Route 67 when we can do that. I sang at the first Country Days. There were several years there that I sang. Then I moved away and then came back. We opened for Sawyer Brown here, and since we formed Route 67, we’ve done tons of them. We did Joe Diffie, Aaron Tippin and Mark Wills. we’ve done Country Days, gosh, probably for the last 15 years or better with this band.”
50th Anniversary Concert
Many people in the Parkland have come to know and love Colleen and Jim Gallagher through the couple’s band, Route 67.
Now, the couple is planning a special concert to mark an important milestone in Gallagher’s career.
“It’s going to be held on the 50th anniversary to the day of the first night that I sang with the band up in Arnold,” she said. “It was my first time of actually standing on the stage and performing. I had brought up the 50 years coming up, and my husband Jim’s like, ‘Why don’t we do something? Why don’t we do a show of some sort?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, we could.’ I didn’t think much more about it. Then he came back and said, ‘I think we really should do this.’
“I’m a reading intervention teacher at Roosevelt Elementary. So, I rented a school building and then put the show together. I’m really excited about it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s going to be kind of a timeline, a lot of musical memories. There’s going to be a lot of pictures, slideshows, videos, things like that. So, there’s a lot going into it. My sister, Kathy Grogan, tells me there could be a surprise or two. My husband and Kathy worked a lot putting things together.”
Gallagher can hardly wait to perform on stage with some of her family and friends again.
“We’re going to have some former musicians we’ve played with,” she said. “My brother Randy is going to be singing, and he hasn’t sang with us for several years. And Kathy is actually going to sing with us, and she hasn’t sang in many years — she just sings with us at home. My buddy Max T. Barnes is coming in from Nashville. He’s going to play with us, too. And then, of course, Route 67 will be there. There may be some other folks show up — it’s just exciting!”
Colleen Kay Gallagher’s 50th Anniversary, A Night of Musical Memories with Special Guests, is being held this Saturday at Truman Auditorium, 209 W. College St. in Farmington. Doors open at 6 p.m., and the show begins at 7. Tickets are $10 each and can be purchased by calling 573-760-4604.
Kevin R. Jenkins is the editor of the Daily Journal. He can be reached at kjenkins@dailyjournalonline.com.
All photos provided by Colleen Kay Gallagher
