Jack Cooke

He grew up in Norton, in southwestern Virginia, one of nine children. His father played the banjo, and the singer and banjo player Dock Boggs was a distant relative; in the older man’s last years Cooke worked as his driver. He took up the guitar as a teenager and played in a band with some of his brothers, and in 1955 he joined the Stanley Brothers’ Clinch Mountain Boys for the first time. Recordings of their shows have him on bass in 1957 and 1958, and singing lead on “Cash on the Barrelhead” at a May 1958 show in West Grove, Pennsylvania.

His time with the Stanleys overlapped with spells in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, a band he kept returning to. He was Monroe’s guitarist on the Decca session of 1 December 1958 at Bradley Film & Recording in Nashville, which produced “Gotta Travel On,” “Big Mon” and “Monroe’s Hornpipe,” and he was on guitar again for “Lonesome Wind Blues” and “Come Go with Me” in November 1959. At Monroe’s concert for the Friends of Old Time Music in New York on 8 February 1963 he played guitar alongside Del McCoury on banjo and Kenny Baker on fiddle, and sang lead on “Walkin’ the Dog” and “I Saw the Light,” with Monroe on tenor. In the early 1960s he also led his own band, the Virginia Mountain Boys, which at one point had McCoury on banjo, and he worked with the Stonemans and with the mandolin player Earl Taylor. In April 1964 he played second guitar on two Stanley Brothers gospel sessions for King in Cincinnati.

In 1970 he rejoined Ralph Stanley as bass player, and he stayed until he retired. His first album with the band came in 1971, when the lineup included the teenage Ricky Skaggs: on Cry from the Cross, recorded for Rebel that February, he sang baritone and tenor behind Stanley and lead singer Roy Lee Centers. Later that year the band made the first of three trips to Japan. Into the 1990s he, Stanley and fiddler Curly Ray Cline were the constant core of the Clinch Mountain Boys while singers and guitarists came and went. He played on Stanley’s guest-star albums Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1992), Clinch Mountain Country (1998) and Clinch Mountain Sweethearts (2001), and on Lost in the Lonesome Pines by Stanley and Jim Lauderdale, which won the Grammy for best bluegrass album at the 2003 awards.

The International Bluegrass Music Association gave him its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2003. In 2007 Pinecastle issued his only album under his own name, Sittin’ on Top of the World, produced by Lauderdale. He stopped touring in 2009 and died at his home in Norton on 1 December that year, five days before his 73rd birthday.