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Artist
Jack Cooke
9+ albums
bluegrass
about
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 playe
