Jack Cooke

As a young man Jack Cooke played and sang with Bill Monroe, but he will be best remembered as the bass player in Ralph Stanley's Clinch Mountain Boys. He grew up in Norton, in south-western Virginia. The town was the home of several distinguished early country musicians, notably the singer and banjo player Dock Boggs, a distant relative for whom Jack worked as a driver in the older man's later years. Jack's father, too, had played the banjo, and his eight brothers and sisters all acquired musical skills.