Storyteller and musician Bonnie Mae Starkey (June 9, 1915 – August 6, 2011) was born on a farm on Franks Run, Doddridge County, to Lafayette and Mary Alice Snodgrass Starkey. Her father was a farmer, sawyer, blacksmith, millwright, boarding house keeper, and general “jack of all trades,” according to Bonnie. Her mother was a midwife who delivered more than 50 babies.

Bonnie was ninth in a line of 13 children, with “29 years and a day between the oldest and the youngest,” she recalled. She helped out on the farm, including working the bellows in her father’s blacksmith shop. She learned shape-note singing from her father. Mentored by her siblings, she honed her skills at playing mandolin, banjo, and guitar and telling a good story.

A graduate of Tyler County High School (1935), she got one of her first paying jobs at the Hopemont tuberculosis sanitarium. Her soon-to-be husband, Archie Carl Collins, lived in nearby Terra Alta and was a miner. They eventually had four children. Two months after their marriage in 1942, he was drafted into the service as an Army engineer in the Pacific. After World War II, the couple lived in her old family homeplace, cared for ailing family members, and raised four children.

She developed her storytelling skills as a 4-H leader, thrilling children with tales of the Western Virginia frontier. She performed at local PTA meetings and for her McClellan Homemakers Club. In 1969, Archie died in his sleep. His death temporarily drained her desire to entertain because she considered him her “biggest fan.” She started working as a school cook, which inspired her poem “The Goodest Cook.” Someone mailed a copy to the state Board of Education, whose nutrition department hired Collins to write poetry for its early childhood program.

As she recalled, “They took me to all these workshops, all over the state. I had principals and county superintendents and teachers from all over, had them standing up, rubbing their bellies, singing foolish songs!” This led to paid workshops at state parks, reading her poems, singing songs, and telling increasingly funny stories. After hearing one of her routines, singer/songwriter David Morris invited her to the Morris Family Old-Time Music Festival in Ivydale, Clay County, where she appeared several times.

Like many traditional artists, musicians, and storytellers, Collins was known primarily only in her local area until the folk revival of the 1970s and, in particular, the Morris Family festival. She soon became a crowd favorite spinning yarns at the Stonewall Jackson Jubilee, the State Folk Festival, and the Mountain State Art & Craft Fair. Billy Edd Wheeler published two of her stories in his book Laughter in Appalachia.

She performed at the first Vandalia Gathering in 1977 and for decades thereafter. She began developing longer-format stories on topics that ran the gamut. Everyone and everything were fair game, at least within the parameters of her deeply held Christian beliefs: marriage, underwear, weight issues, preachers, corpses, and ghosts, to name a few. Many were variations of tales she remembered from her Doddridge County upbringing. In the 1980s, she began a longtime run as a judge at the Vandalia Liar’s Contest, awarded annually to the best teller of tall tales. Contest host Ken Sullivan would introduce her to a rousing ovation as the “Belle of Doddridge County.”

In 1984, she performed on one of the first broadcasts of Mountain Stage and was invited back three more times. In 1990, she became the first storyteller to receive the Vandalia Award, West Virginia’s highest folklife honor. She also co-authored the children’s book Rocks in My Pockets.

In her spare time, she continued her 4-H work and served as a “foster grandparent” in Doddridge schools, working one-on-one with students who had learning issues or problems at home. She used her stories and songs as a much-anticipated reward for students who finished their assignments. She remarked of them: “They’re such marvelous kids. They’re not all perfect angels—some of their halos are bent a little bit, and some of their wings are kind of ragged, but I loved every one of them. I’m the one that’s lucky!”

Bonnie Collins lived her final years in a Clarksburg nursing home but, at age 88, still performed at the Smithsonian Folk Festival in Washington, D.C. She died in Clarksburg at age 96.