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‘‘A friend was teasing me about opening for myself,” says Collins who speaks with a soft, unassuming country twang. ‘‘The Cowgirls are acoustic, so we’ll start out on a quiet note, then switch over to the honky tonk!”

The contradictory nature of this country crooner doesn’t end with the music. Although the plethora of love-gone-wrong songs on ‘‘Tail Light Blues” might lead one to believe otherwise, the Takoma Park resident is happily married.

‘‘I celebrate the day you put on your walking shoes,” she sings. And, ‘‘Our love is a song gone wrong. Cupid is singing out of tune.” Some are sad, some are funny — as if Loretta Lynn channeled Thelma and Louise.

‘‘You take the wedding gifts,” the CD’s title song goes. ‘‘I never liked them anyway.”

And yet, Collins admits, ‘‘I’m married to a really nice husband.

‘‘He says, ‘When are you going to write a love song?’”

Retro country

In the rural southwestern Virginia town where Collins grew up, the mountains were beautiful, but they blocked out the world.

‘‘I heard a lot of country music,” she says. ‘‘Because of the mountains, you could only get a couple of stations, and they were all country stations.”

She remembers singing ever since she was a little girl, mostly in church.

A cousin had a piano — ‘‘I was so jealous,” she recalls. Collins’ first instrument was an old guitar salvaged from her mother’s North Carolina home.

Then her aunt sat on it, accidentally, and broke its neck.

There was a beat-up guitar she traded for a dress, and then the unwieldy steel stringer her mom got by trading in S&H green stamps. Nowadays Collins favors a red Gibson J45 — red is her favorite color — and a country sound that has evolved just a bit.

‘‘Twenty-five years ago, I started playing old-time music, square dance music,” she says. ‘‘After that, I got into Cajun music with my other band, Squeeze Bayou.”

The sound she strives for with the Back Roads Band — Collins on rhythm guitar, vocals and fiddle, plus Ira Gitlin on lead guitar and vocals, Geff King on bass and vocals, and Rob Howe on drums — is retro country.

‘‘It’s a style like they played back in the ’50s and ’60s: Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams,” she explains. ‘‘Most of the songs we do are originals.”

Flash and feudin’

That’s how it is now, but songwriting was something Collins hardly considered in the past.

‘‘I came to songwriting late in life,” she says. ‘‘I’ve only been writing songs for about three years.”

It has been a good three years, though. Her songs have won at the South Florida Folk Song Contest, the Susquehanna Folk Song Contest, the Mid-Atlantic Folk Song Contest and a bunch of other festivals.

‘‘I never thought of myself as a writer,” she says. ‘‘In college, I was taking all these math and computer science courses, and avoiding writing.”

Her degrees from Radford College – a bachelor of arts degree in math and a master’s in computer science — have come in handy.

‘‘I have a day job to support my music habit,” she laughs. ‘‘I love singing. I love music and performing.”

On Monday evening, Collins will trot out the retro country, the story-songs and the fiddle music — the works.

‘‘We’re hoping there’ll be dancers there,” says Collins. ‘‘A lot of our music is lively, and people get up to dance.”

Whether you dance along or just listen with your feet tapping, all Collins’ music is strongly flavored with an old-fashioned country vibe and delivered with a twang and a flourish.

‘‘Geff and I do the singing,” she says. ‘‘He’s the bass player, does lead and harmony vocals. He’s very talented.”

And, indeed, on the old George Jones⁄Melba Montgomery duet ‘‘Feudin’ and Fightin’, the two voices paint a classic picture of, y’know, love gone wrong. It’s sad, funny and beautiful, all at the same time.

But what else would you expect from a real live coal miner’s daughter and her retro country honky tonk band?

Karen Collins and the Back Roads Band. and opening act Blue Moon Cowgirls, will perform at an Institute of Musical Traditions concert at 7:30 p.m. Monday in St. Mark Presbyterian Church, 10701 Old Georgetown Road, Rockville. Tickets are $17, $14 in advance. Call 301-754-3611 or visit www.imtfolk.org