Suzanne Cox

She was born on 5 June 1967. The family had been performing bluegrass, acoustic country and gospel together since 1972, touring Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas from their home in the northwest of the state. On their first album, I Shall Not Be Moved (Wilcox, 1978), she sang tenor; by Heartaches Along the Horizon (Wilcox, 1987) she was also the band’s mandolin player.

She sang harmony on “Steel Rails” and “Tonight I’ll Be Lonely Too” on Alison Krauss’s I’ve Got That Old Feeling (Rounder, 1990), and Krauss went on to produce the family’s Rounder debut, Everybody’s Reaching Out for Someone (1993). Suzanne sang lead on “Standing by the Bedside of a Neighbor,” “But I Do,” “Pardon Me” and “Cry, Baby, Cry,” which was issued as a single, and tenor on most of the rest. On I Know Who Holds Tomorrow (Rounder, 1994), recorded with Krauss and her band, she took the lead on the title song, “Will There Be Any Stars?,” “I’d Rather Have Jesus” and “Walk Over God’s Heaven,” a duet with Krauss that was released as a single with a music video. The album won the Grammy for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album in 1995. Krauss also produced the family’s Beyond the City (Rounder, 1995), which was nominated for a Grammy, and their Asylum album Just When We’re Thinking It’s Over (1996), from which a version of “Runaway” was released as a single.

Through the 1990s and 2000s she sang harmony on other artists’ records, among them Dolly Parton’s Heartsongs (1994), the Lynn Morris Band’s Mama’s Hand (Rounder, 1995), on the title song and “Mason’s Lament,” Matraca Berg’s Sunday Morning to Saturday Night (1997), Krauss’s Forget About It (1999), Randy Travis’s Glory Train (2005), Alan Jackson’s Like Red on a Rose (2006) and Ron Block’s DoorWay (2007). She sang lead on two tracks of the Reno Brothers’ Drawing From the Well (1996) and on “Silent Night” on Charlie Daniels’s Joy to the World (2009). With her brother Sidney she wrote “Borderline,” which Alison Krauss and Union Station recorded on Lonely Runs Both Ways (2004).

On the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (2000) the Cox Family’s “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)” has Suzanne on lead vocal and mandolin, Evelyn on guitar, Sidney on banjo and harmony, and Willard on harmony; the 2011 deluxe edition added the family’s “In the Highways.” She also appears in Down From the Mountain (2001), the concert recordings made from the soundtrack’s music. The family’s last album, Gone Like the Cotton (Rounder, 2015), produced by Krauss and completed from tracks begun as much as seventeen years earlier, has her lead vocal on the title song, “Good Imitation of the Blues,” “Good News,” “I’m Not So Far Away” and “Too Far Gone”; it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s bluegrass albums chart. Later sessions include Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley’s World Full of Blues (2019).