Anyway, she wasn’t around for the fun. “He met my mom when he got out,” she says of her father. “He did eleven years, two threes and a five. He says they finally convinced him it was against the law,” and her eyes sparkle as she laughs, for it seems to be a story she has heard often, and told frequently.
“It’s not like he was a moonshiner with overalls and a donkey,” she begins. “He had a car called the White Ghost and he ran with an organized crime ring that ran up and down the eastern seaboard. It was a big operation, and he was in one facet of that operation that happened to be the moonshining business. It was highly organized. They had their stills on wheels, they pulled them in and out of the swamps, they constantly moved them because the feds were constantly tracking them.”
It has the sound of fun and romance and adrenaline, except for the part where reality intrudes and time is served. Mr. Cook was hanging out in a bar, awaiting sentencing for his third vacation behind bars, when a fellow sat down and asked for help. He’d just lost his job at the factory and wanted to see about setting up a still so he could feed his kids, simple as that.
“They got tracked back in,” Elizabeth says. “They took off running, that guy took off one way, Dad took off the other way. Down in Florida, the Jacksonville swamps, the land’s cut in squares and there’s drainage ditches. He stepped in one of those ditches, and all the sudden his boots became real heavy.
“I think it was a state trooper, this time,” she goes on. “Caught him, handcuffed him to a tree, and fell over with a heart attack.”
(If this were a Burt Reynolds move, he’d have gotten a foot out of that boot, picked up a branch, snaked the keys over, unlocked his handcuffs, and saved the state trooper’s life with CPR to win a pardon. But that’s not what happened.)
“He didn’t die, but…being that my dad was awaiting sentencing, had to be chased, and the dude had a heart attack, they were really pissed, I think, and threw the book at him.” And she laughs, because this was a long time ago, and she might not be around had it not played out like that.
“My dad’s one of these characters that, his life’s always been that way,” she says. “He had a very hard time growing up — sharecropped, right along with the black folk, and he got his welding certificate in jail, he played upright bass in the prison band. When he left they had a going-away party for him.”
But here is the point to the story, and Mr. Cook’s principal gift to his daughter — not the music, but this: “You can’t make him have a bad time, even if he’s in jail.”
She speaks of her father with delight and affection, but it is her West Virginia-born mother who appears periodically in her songs. “Five babies from a deadbeat dad/It’s a wonder that you even had/The time to play,” she sang in “Mama You Wanted To Be A Singer Too”, from 2002’s Hey Y’All. “When I’m down and think nobody cares/I remember that I’m in my mama’s prayers,” she sings on Balls. Her father came with five children, too, so she became the eleventh member of a very extended family.
“There were two sisters still left at home when I was born,” she says. “The youngest was ten years older. Daddy was drinking pretty good by then and they both wanted out, so they went at their first opportunity. I have a few memories of them being there, but not many. We always went to the beach on the weekends with plenty of Pabst and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The youngest sister left her Eagles and CCR cassette tapes, my only window outside hardcore country music until we got cable and MTV.
“The neighborhood I grew up in was actually a little community in Florida with seashell roads and baby alligators and moccasins swimming in the dredged-out ditches. My daddy was a welder, had the only mobile welding truck, so he could drive out into the middle of a watermelon field and fix a burst irrigation pipe, save the crop from blistering in the hot Florida sun. He was a local hero and everybody loved him, even though we were kinda lower class, had a welding shop in our front yard. And he was a drunk.”
Was, not is.
Today her parents live on a small farm outside of Nashville, surrounded by critters, tending their garden, and playing country music on Friday nights down where they fry catfish at the marina. Occasionally they will play a short set before Elizabeth takes the stage.
Truth is, her folks were disappointed when Elizabeth Cook took off for college, pledged Kappa Delta at Georgia Southern, and ended up with a double major in accounting and computer information systems and a 3.4 GPA. “When I was 18 years old, if I looked like you, I’d have been on a bus to Nashville,” that’s what her mama said.
