Jack Cooke

As a young man Jack Cooke played and sang with Bill Monroe, but he will be best remembered as the bass player in Ralph Stanley's Clinch Mountain Boys. He grew up in Norton, in south-western Virginia. The town was the home of several distinguished early country musicians, notably the singer and banjo player Dock Boggs, a distant relative for whom Jack worked as a driver in the older man's later years. Jack's father, too, had played the banjo, and his eight brothers and sisters all acquired musical skills. Work in the area's coalmines and the demands of young families diverted most of them from a career in music, but Jack's brother Hubert later formed a group with his wife, Jeanette, the Cooke Duet (later the Singing Cookes), which is highly valued by lovers of old-time Appalachian gospel music. As a teenager, Jack took up the guitar. He liked to recall that he told his sister: "I'm never going to work. I'm going to let this guitar do it for me." He played in a band with some of his brothers for a while, then, in 1955, joined Stanley's back-up band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, for the first time; Ralph and his brother Carter, as the Stanley Brothers, were bluegrass music's leading duet act at the time. After about a year with the Stanley Brothers, he left to join Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, where he played the guitar on recordings now regarded as classics, such as Gotta Travel On. Quitting the Blue Grass Boys in 1960, he formed his own band, the Virginia Mountain Boys, and played with the Stonemans and with the mandolinist Earl Taylor before rejoining the Clinch Mountain Boys on bass in 1970. "The first day I took the job," he told the bluegrass historian John Wright, "Ralph said, 'You can have the record sales.' That works good. I enjoy talking to people and sitting around the table and selling a few records and tapes. I get a good commission on them." Soon the records would be ones on which he had played. He made his first of many albums under Ralph Stanley's leadership in 1971, when the band included the teenaged Ricky Skaggs. Soon afterwards he played, and sang various vocal parts, on the now classic gospel set Cry from the Cross. Later that year the band made the first of three trips to Japan. Throughout the 70s, 80s and most of the 90s, while young lead singers and guitarists came and went, Jack, Ralph and the fiddler Curly Ray Cline (who died in 1997) were the heartbeat of a band that most bluegrass experts considered the equal of Monroe's; some placed them even higher. The band's steadily growing celebrity in the larger world of American folk and acoustic music led to three "Ralph Stanley and friends" collaborations in which Cooke played his usual part. Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1992), Clinch Mountain Country (1998) and Clinch Mountain Sweethearts (2001) drew in guests including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Monroe and Alison Krauss. Cooke also played on Lost in the Lonesome Pines, by Ralph Stanley and Jim Lauderdale, which received a Grammy award in 2002 for best bluegrass album. In 2007, Lauderdale produced Cooke's only album in his own name, Sittin' On Top of the World. As a sideman, Cooke may seem to have played a background role in the stories of bluegrass and of the Clinch Mountain Boys, but he was no spear-carrier. As well as playing the bass – which in bluegrass also means being the butt of many, many old jokes – and rhythm guitar if necessary, and singing any part he was called on to supply, he had warmth and approachability, on stage and off, that were invaluable in a band whose leader could sometimes seem a little remote. He is survived by three sisters and two brothers. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.