Willard Cox

From their home in northwestern Louisiana the family toured the state and neighboring Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas, singing hymns alongside original songs. Their first album, I Shall Not Be Moved (Wilcox, 1978), has Willard on fiddle and vocals, with Evelyn on lead guitar and lead vocals, Sidney on banjo, Lynn on bass, Suzanne singing tenor and his wife, Marie, singing alto.

Krauss produced the family’s first Rounder album, Everybody’s Reaching Out for Someone (1993). Willard sang lead on “Little Whitewashed Chimney” and “Why Not Confess” and the bass part under his daughters on “Standing by the Bedside of a Neighbor” and “Cry Baby Cry.” On I Know Who Holds Tomorrow (Rounder, 1994), made by the family with Krauss and the musicians of her band, he took the lead on “Far Side Bank of Jordan” and sang low tenor on the title song, “Will There Be Any Stars?” and “Where No One Stands Alone.” The album won the Grammy for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album at the 37th Grammy Awards, in 1995.

The family’s arrangement of “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest),” with Suzanne singing lead and Willard and Sidney the harmonies, was chosen for the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, and Willard had a small acting part in the film. Shortly after the soundtrack sessions in 2000, he and Marie were seriously injured in a road accident and the band stopped touring; it returned the following year for a limited number of dates.

The family’s last album, Gone Like the Cotton (Rounder, 2015), was completed from tracks begun as much as seventeen years earlier and finished without his participation, but it keeps his lead vocals on “Cash on the Barrelhead,” “Honky Tonk Blues” and “I’ll Get Over You.” Willard Cox died in November 2019, aged 82.