Jim Cox

The Country Gentlemen, formed in the Washington, D.C., area in the summer of 1957 by Charlie Waller, John Duffey and Bill Emerson, went through a string of bass players in their first years. Larry Lahey left soon after the start and was followed by Tom Morgan, who was replaced in turn by Cox; one account dates his arrival to 1958. The earliest session on which he is documented took place on 30 June 1959 at the Capitol Transcription Service on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, with Mike Seeger or Ed Beher engineering: Waller on guitar, the new banjo player Eddie Adcock, Duffey on Dobro, Cox on bass and Seeger on autoharp for “New Freedom Bell” and Duffey’s “The Hills and Home,” which Starday issued as a single.

The same four musicians cut Duffey’s “A Letter to Tom” and “Darling Alalee” around January 1960, and in a long session around March 1960, again with Seeger at the controls, they recorded the material for Country Songs, Old and New: “Roving Gambler,” “The Little Sparrow,” “Drifting Too Far,” “The Story of Charlie Lawson,” “Jesse James,” “Poor Ellen Smith,” “The Long Black Veil” and Adcock’s “Turkey Knob,” among others. On “Paul and Silas,” “The Long Black Veil” and “Have Thine Own Way” Cox added the bass voice below Waller, Duffey and Adcock. His last session with the band, on 20 April 1960, produced “Helen,” the B-side of Starday’s single of “Poor Ellen Smith.” He left that year, and Tom Gray, then nineteen, took over the bass.

In April 1963 Cox was the bass player when Red Allen and Frank Wakefield, with Ralph “Robbie” Robinson on banjo, cut demonstration recordings for Rebel in Pete Kuykendall’s basement studio, Wynwood, in Falls Church, Virginia, among them Allen’s “Don’t Lie to Me,” which stayed unissued until Rebel put it on CD decades later. The same group returned to Wynwood on 2 October 1963 for the single “Little Birdie” and “Faded Memory” (Rebel F-242) and for two of Wakefield’s mandolin instrumentals, “Musician’s Waltz” and “Rondo.”