The Greatest Oldies Music

Country

As Parkinson’s disease made performing harder for Jeff Cook, Alabama kept his microphone onstage. Whether he could join them that night or not, his place remained. Jeff had formed the band with cousins Randy Owen and Teddy Gentry in Fort Payne, Alabama. They spent six years playing for tips at The Bowery in Myrtle Beach before finding their breakthrough. Twenty-one consecutive No. 1 hits followed. Jeff’s guitar, fiddle and keyboards helped build the sound audiences came to recognize. The first warning appeared away from music: he struggled to cast a fishing lure. Later, he began missing notes. Jeff suspected a pinched nerve; Randy and Teddy worried he had suffered a stroke. Doctors diagnosed Parkinson’s. He kept the diagnosis private for years. As his symptoms became more noticeable, some people mistook his unsteadiness for drinking. Randy later said those rumors were especially painful. He and Teddy wanted to defend their friend, but respected his decision to keep his health private. In April 2017, Jeff told fans what was happening. He also made clear that he wanted the band to continue. “We could hire 10 people, but we can’t replace Jeff Cook in the group Alabama,” Teddy said. Additional musicians helped cover his parts. His microphone stayed where it belonged. Randy, meanwhile, spoke openly about how difficult it was to find the same drive without Jeff beside him. Continuing meant adjusting to the absence of someone who had shared the work from the barroom years onward. Jeff died at his home in Destin, Florida, on November 7, 2022, at 73. Long before that final goodbye, his bandmates had found a simple way to keep welcoming him: a microphone waiting whenever he could return.

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In April 2017, Jeff Cook, Randy Owen and Teddy Gentry sat down together with The Tennessean in Nashville. For years, the three cousins who built Alabama had kept a secret. That day, they finally told it. Jeff had Parkinson’s disease, and he was coming off the road.

Most of the coverage focused on Jeff. But in that same conversation, Randy Owen said something that showed how much the news was costing the man at center stage.

“I Don’t Know If I Have the Fire”

Jeff did not want the band to stop because of him. He told his cousins to keep going. Randy explained it plainly:

“He wants us to go on. We want the music to go on. I’m going to be very honest. I don’t know if I have the fire. The only way I do is knowing that Jeff is totally, ‘Go get it.’”

Randy Owen had stood at the front of Alabama for more than four decades. He had sung “Mountain Music,” “Dixieland Delight” and “Song of the South” to packed arenas. And he admitted he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it without Jeff beside him. The only thing keeping the fire lit was Jeff’s blessing.

The band had faced this kind of moment once before. When Randy was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, the three of them had to think about what Alabama would be if one of them could not go on. So when Jeff got his news, they already knew the answer. The music would continue, but only because Jeff wanted it to.

The Secret They Carried

Jeff was diagnosed about four years before that interview. The first sign was something small. He was an avid fisherman, and one day he could not cast his lure where he aimed it. Then he began having trouble with his guitar solos. He thought it was a pinched nerve. Randy and Teddy were afraid he had suffered a stroke. His doctor was the first to suggest Parkinson’s, and a test confirmed it. Jeff later said the news left him feeling empty.

He told Randy and Teddy right away. The three agreed to keep it private.

That choice came with a price. As Jeff’s symptoms began to show on stage, people started whispering that he had a substance abuse problem. Randy said that was the hardest part:

“That’s the part that hurts so bad, for people to think that he’s intoxicated or something.”

Randy added that he and Teddy held back, even though they wanted to say plenty to the people spreading those rumors. They never did. They kept Jeff’s secret until Jeff was ready to share it himself.

Jeff’s Own Words

Jeff wrote a letter to the fans. He explained that the disease robs you of coordination and balance and causes tremors, and that it had made playing guitar, fiddle and singing extremely frustrating. Then he gave the reason he had stayed silent so long:

“I’ve tried not to burden anyone with the details of my condition because I do not want the music to stop or the party to end.”

He made clear he was not quitting. His body was telling him it was time to take a break. He signed off with a phrase from a song he had co-written in 2015, “No Bad Days.” After his diagnosis, fans began quoting that song back to him in letters and notes.

The Microphone That Stayed

Jeff stepped away from touring at the end of April 2017. Teddy Gentry made it clear that nobody was taking his place:

“We could hire 10 people, but we can’t replace Jeff Cook in the group Alabama.”

Other musicians covered his parts. Megan Mullins took over the fiddle. But Randy and Teddy promised that Jeff’s microphone would stay on stage at every show, whether he was there to use it or not. They kept that promise for years, in case Jeff felt well enough to walk out and sing.

Some nights, he did. He dropped in when his health allowed. In 2020, he played several shows with Randy and Teddy during the Country Music Cruise.

Saying Goodbye

Jeff Cook died on November 7, 2022, at his beach home in Destin, Florida, with family and close friends by his side. He was 73.

Randy wrote that he wished they could play “My Home’s in Alabama” together one more time, and that he was hurt in a way he couldn’t describe. Teddy wrote that the three of them had been closer than brothers, and that no one could ever take Jeff’s place.

Randy and Teddy still tour as Alabama. When a reporter asked Randy what it was like playing those songs without Jeff, his answer went right back to that 2017 promise:

“Me and Teddy are doing what Jeff would have done had one of us passed away.”

Jeff wanted the party to go on. His cousins found the fire to keep it going, because he asked them to.

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Marty Robbins’s tribute to his wife reached record stores on January 23, 1970. Four days later, he underwent triple bypass surgery at Nashville’s St. Thomas Hospital. He had gone in expecting a checkup and permission to race that spring. Although he had suffered a heart attack while touring Ohio the previous August, he told reporters he had felt well since. The tests revealed two blocked arteries and a third that was 75 percent obstructed. “I came and took them and found out nothing was all right,” he said. The January 27 operation was the first triple bypass performed at St. Thomas, at a time when the procedure was still uncommon. One doctor described Marty as having entered surgery hanging by a thread. Meanwhile, listeners were discovering “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife,” written for Marizona. They had met at an ice cream parlor in Glendale, Arizona. She wanted to marry a singing cowboy; he was singing in Phoenix clubs and struggling to make a living. They married on September 27, 1948, the day after his twenty-third birthday. Marizona was eighteen. By the spring of 1970, the song had reached No. 1. “My wife is everything I said in the song,” Marty explained. “It’s a true song.” Recovery brought him back to racing that fall. His appetite for it survived the surgery: at Charlotte in 1974, he drove into a wall at roughly 160 miles an hour to avoid Richard Childress’s stalled car. He needed 37 stitches in his face. On December 8, 1982, another heart attack and emergency surgery ended differently. Marty died at St. Thomas at 57, with Marizona and their children at the hospital. They had been married for 34 years. The young singer she had met in Arizona had become a country star, and among the records he left behind was his own account of what she had meant to him.

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There’s a grin behind Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me Now?!” that makes its wounded pride even more entertaining. Co-written with Chuck Cannon and released in November 1999, it spent five weeks atop Billboard’s country chart and became the biggest country hit of 2000. I’ve always enjoyed the satisfaction in its story: the small-town boy dismissed in high school finally gets his chance to be heard. Toby gives him plenty of swagger, but you can still hear how much the rejection stung. That lingering hurt makes the boast work. He’s successful now—and he wants someone who doubted him to notice.

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Toby Keith had a gift for telling a ridiculous barroom story as though it had happened to someone you knew. In “The Size I Wear,” co-written with Rivers Rutherford for his 2012 album *Hope on the Rocks*, two friends settle in for beers before a group of secretaries gives the evening a new direction. What I enjoy most is the mischief in his delivery. He lets the situation get out of hand without sounding remotely surprised. A few drinks, a little misplaced confidence, and suddenly there’s a story somebody will have to explain the next morning. Toby knew exactly how to land that kind of joke.

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Marty Robbins’s tribute to his wife reached record stores on January 23, 1970. Four days later, he underwent triple bypass surgery at Nashville’s St. Thomas Hospital. He had gone in expecting a checkup and permission to race that spring. Although he had suffered a heart attack while touring Ohio the previous August, he told reporters he had felt well since. The tests revealed two blocked arteries and a third that was 75 percent obstructed. “I came and took them and found out nothing was all right,” he said. The January 27 operation was the first triple bypass performed at St. Thomas, at a time when the procedure was still uncommon. One doctor described Marty as having entered surgery hanging by a thread. Meanwhile, listeners were discovering “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife,” written for Marizona. They had met at an ice cream parlor in Glendale, Arizona. She wanted to marry a singing cowboy; he was singing in Phoenix clubs and struggling to make a living. They married on September 27, 1948, the day after his twenty-third birthday. Marizona was eighteen. By the spring of 1970, the song had reached No. 1. “My wife is everything I said in the song,” Marty explained. “It’s a true song.” Recovery brought him back to racing that fall. His appetite for it survived the surgery: at Charlotte in 1974, he drove into a wall at roughly 160 miles an hour to avoid Richard Childress’s stalled car. He needed 37 stitches in his face. On December 8, 1982, another heart attack and emergency surgery ended differently. Marty died at St. Thomas at 57, with Marizona and their children at the hospital. They had been married for 34 years. The young singer she had met in Arizona had become a country star, and among the records he left behind was his own account of what she had meant to him.

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