Men and women don’t always get along in Elizabeth Cook’s lyrics. There’s the mechanic who cons his housewife clientele in “Sometimes It Takes Balls To Be A Woman.” There’s the mullet-haired charmer who may or may not slip Quaaludes to his dates in “El Camino.” Then, of course, there’s the guy who gets so loaded he can hardly get it up in “Yes to Booty.”
Cook draws on her own background in this war of the red-state genders. Though currently a Nashville resident, the country singer grew up in what she calls a “depressed, forgotten, inland rural county in central Florida.” Her parents—then divorcees with five children each—met after her father’s release from an eight-year stint in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for running moonshine. “I could have been a lot of guys’ little woman,” she says when we speak on the phone. “Growing up in a blue-collar surrounding in the South, expectations of what you do and what you say and what you do with your life are definitely carved out.”
But the guitar-slinger certainly doesn’t live, or write, according to anyone’s pre-conceived standards. She’s a Grand Ole Opry regular who’s mostly unnoticed by the FM set, a Loretta Lynn fangirl who covers the Velvet Underground, a serious songwriter who clogs. Her dual personas started young. “My daddy raised me to be like a boy ‘cause he wanted me to be tough,” she says. “But I’ve always been a petite blonde at the same time—a petite blonde that could go frog-gigging and deal with business situations in a forward way.”
Despite the dark incarnations of Southern machismo in her lyrics, Cook’s men aren’t all bad. In “Rock n Roll Man,” she satirizes a self-styled rock god boyfriend with a lightning-bolt earring and dagger tattoo, but one gets the feeling she adores him, too. “Sometimes we’re Sid and Nancy or Courtney and Kurt,” she sings. “We get higher than Heaven, we get lower than dirt / It’s the fighting and loving that make it work.”
It might have something to do with the fact that “Rock n Roll Man” is loosely based on Cook’s husband and guitarist, Tim Carroll. “There are pieces of it that are probably directly related and there are pieces of it that are artistic license,” she says. When I ask Carroll himself about the song, he laughs. (“I don’t have a lightning-bolt shaped earring,” he says.)
Cook and Carroll have been together on- and offstage since 1998. It’s a familiar kind of partnership for Cook, whose parents, Joyce and Tom, also toured together as country musicians, becoming known as “The Medicare Duo” in later years. “They really had a beautiful love affair that didn’t start out that way,” says Cook. “Daddy was a mad drunk with the kind of issues that he experienced in his childhood—sharecropping and terrible poverty.” Eventually, however, he joined AA and began singing. “I wouldn’t say my mother was liberated,” says Cook. “But because my dad was a musician he really embraced the [musical] part of her, and that was the most important sense of self-expression for her.”
Men and women may not always get along on Cook’s albums, but when they do, it’s poignant as only a country ballad can be. In “Follow You Like Smoke,” the doublewides and booze and greasy-fingered mechanics melt away like Appalachian mist. Cook chants quiet, steel-and-string-laden couplets: “I’d stick to you like glue, if I was able to / Cling to you like vine, if you just say that’s fine / Hold you in my arms and I would never tire / Follow you like smoke from the fire.”
Elizabeth Cook (opening for Todd Snider)
Friday, Feb. 18
Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz
$25-$40 at www.snazzyproductions.com
