English “Cousin Jake” Tullock

He was born on 23 July 1922 in Etowah, about sixty-five miles southwest of Knoxville, and went by Junior to avoid confusion with his father, English P. Tullock Sr., who wrote a few hymns. His first music was church singing; he formed a gospel quartet with his sisters and accompanied them on guitar. At sixteen or seventeen he moved to Knoxville to stay with an aunt and uncle, and because WNOX there carried the daily Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round and the Saturday-night Tennessee Barn Dance, he found work with several of the groups on those shows. Army service from 1942 to 1946, which took him to the Philippines and New Guinea, interrupted all of this. Back in Knoxville he learned bricklaying, but a chance meeting with Burkett “Uncle Josh” Graves led him to a string bass and into Esco Hankins and the Crazy Tennesseans, where Graves also played. The two of them supplied much of that band’s comedy, and Hankins gave him the name “Cousin Jake.” After about a year with Hankins and a stint in a textile mill, he spent most of the next six years with the Bailey Brothers and the Happy Valley Boys, an early bluegrass band that moved between stations in Knoxville, Raleigh, Roanoke and Wheeling. He played on virtually all of their sessions from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, for the Rich-R-Tone and Canary labels, including “The Sweetest Gift, a Mother’s Smile,” “Alabama,” “I Never Will Marry” and “We Shall Rise.”

A return to Knoxville early in 1954, to work with Don Gibson, is where he first met Flatt and Scruggs. He joined the Foggy Mountain Boys that spring and made his recording debut with them on 19 May 1954 on “You’re Not a Drop in the Bucket,” which features his high baritone harmony and a bass slap in a pause in the singing. Complications from malaria he had contracted during the war soon forced him off the road, and from 1955 until 1958 he lived in Knoxville and played locally with the Bailey Brothers and others. When Flatt and Scruggs sought him out again in early 1958 the band was on the Grand Ole Opry and on regular television, and this time he stayed until it ended in early 1969. Over those eleven years he and Josh Graves worked up comedy routines that drew on their days with Hankins, and his high harmony became part of the Flatt and Scruggs sound, especially in the middle and later 1960s. The two men also made an album of comedy, instrumentals and vocal standards, Just Joshin’, for the independent Cotton Town Jubilee label in 1963. His years with the band took in Carnegie Hall, the Newport Folk Festival, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (the theme of The Beverly Hillbillies and the first chart-topping bluegrass recording), the Bonnie and Clyde soundtrack and the 1969 presidential inaugural parade.

When Flatt and Scruggs split, he stayed with Flatt in the Nashville Grass. A heart attack in May 1970 led him to retire from the road a year later, and he took a job as a police dispatcher in Etowah. He still made guest appearances, among them a 1983 Foggy Mountain Boys reunion, and helped the Bailey Brothers record two new albums. He died in Maryville, Tennessee, on 18 June 1988, aged 65. In 1994 Etowah began an annual one-day Jake Tullock Memorial Bluegrass Festival, and Barry Bales of Alison Krauss & Union Station emulates his playing in the Earls of Leicester, a Flatt and Scruggs tribute band.