Rockabilly Redux : The Collins Kids helped establish the sound in the ‘50s and will resurrect it Saturday at the Palomino.

Before the pop charts ever erupted with grunge or metal or rap or “classic rock,” there was rockabilly, which was never just some sweet little pop novelty sound. This was the same serious rhythm that launched Elvis , after all, along with Carl Perkins and all those other slick-haired singers in their blue suede shoes.

This was back in the 1950s, when rock ‘n’ roll was something new, and even a little dangerous. So who were those two children (ages 8 and 10), calling themselves the Collins Kids and singing songs like “Beetle Bug Bop” and “Hoy Hoy” every Saturday night on Los Angeles television?

Larry and Lorrie Collins were a couple of Oklahoma kids who had come to California with their parents, won some Los Angeles talent contests, and landed a gig on the popular “Town Hall Party” TV show in 1954, doing what they could to establish this new rockabilly sound, much as Presley, Perkins and the others were doing in Memphis. For 14 years, while growing up mainly in the San Fernando Valley, the Collins Kids shared the stage with such guest performers as Patsy Cline, Merle Travis and Johnny Cash.

“That was live television, and you didn’t get a second chance at anything,” remembers Larry, now 48. “They pointed a finger at you and you went like hell.”

That same intensity will probably be back when the duo performs its first Los Angeles show in at least a dozen years on Saturday at the Palomino in North Hollywood. The performance at the club comes as part of a new phase of activity that began earlier this year with appearances at music festivals in Europe, and a single performance in San Francisco last month.

“We kept getting phone calls from Europe all the time,” says Lorrie, who now lives in Reno, near her brother. “They had our records over there and they wanted us to come over. Finally last year we decided to go see what it was like.”

Their overseas popularity came with the release and re-release in recent years of more than a dozen albums of their old material, with some music tracks actually pulled from videotapes of “Town Hall Party.”

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“It’s wonderful there,” says Larry of that European trip. “There were 5,000 kids singing ‘Beetle Bug Bop.’ They know all the words, all the guitar licks. They’ve got it down to who played drums, who played bass, where it was recorded originally. They live the history of the whole thing.”

As on those European dates, the Collins Kids will focus entirely on their rockabilly years for the Palomino show. That’s the music that remains most personal for them, created before outside interests directed the young duo to Nashville and elsewhere to alter their sound for commercial reasons. Their stage show may present a “purist” view of their rockabilly roots, Larry says, but “personally, I like all kinds of music. I’ll listen to any kind of music if it’s good, from classical to flamenco. But my favorite, of course, would have to be rockabilly.

“It makes us both very proud to know that we accomplished that in our younger years,” adds Larry, who still plays a double-neck electric guitar. “The thing we had when we first started, and I think we have it again, is enthusiasm.”

Not that the brother and sister were inactive musically when not performing as the Collins Kids. Larry Collins kept busy as a songwriter for such artists as Kenny Rogers, Tanya Tucker and Three Dog Night, writing or co-writing such pop-country hits as “Delta Dawn” and “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma.” And Lorrie Collins sang on records by Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson.

Until their hiatus in 1981, the Collins Kids worked 27 weeks of the year in Nevada touring the big hotel-casinos of Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Reno. Now they are planning to record a new album next spring in a Northern California studio. The songs are still to be chosen, but Lorrie promises, “our first love is rockabilly, so we hope to keep it simple and straight to it.”

Where and When What: The Collins Kids, with the Dave & Deke Combo, Ronnie Mack and Friends at The Palomino, 6907 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Hours: 9 p.m. Saturday. Price: $15. Call: (818) 764-4010.