Jeffrey Alan Cook Cause Of Death: Country Music Legend Passes Away At 73!!

A co-founder of the influential Country Music Hall of Fame band Alabama, Jeff Cook, passed away on Monday at the age of 73.

Jeffrey Alan Cook Cause Of Death

Cook battled Parkinson’s illness, a degenerative nervous system disease that impairs mobility and causes tremors, for ten years. In 2017, he made his illness public. The Tennessean received confirmation of his passing on Tuesday afternoon from a band spokesperson.

Cook passed away at his Florida beachfront house in Destin. Along with his cousins Randy Owen and Teddy Gentry, Cook helped create a pattern for what a successful country band can accomplish as a guitarist, fiddler, and vocalist in Alabama.

He and the band filled in the sketch with a string of successes, including “Song of the South,” “Mountain Music,” “I’m In A Hurry,” “Cheap Seats,” and “My Home’s In Alabama,” which are now widely regarded as must-hear country music.

On March 8, 2018, Jeff Cook from Alabama plays at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee’s Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jam XX: A Tribute to Charlie. Cook, a native of Alabama’s sleepy hamlet of Fort Payne, started out pursuing his passion for music as a disc jockey in his hometown.

Along with Gentry and Owen, he co-founded the band Young Country in 1969, sowing the seeds for Alabama to come. By the middle of the 1970s, the cousins were performing under the name Wildcountry. They got their start in surrounding locations like Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the band embraced a blend of country songwriting and Southern rock sensibilities throughout several long nights at the Bowery neighborhood club.

In 1977, the group changed its name to Alabama. Cook, Owen, and Gentry accepted an offer to perform at the prestigious “New Faces” presentation at the annual Country Radio Seminar in Nashville two years later, following a run of minor radio success and the adoption of drummer Mark Herndon as a full-time member.

Career In Music

Later that year, the band signed a contract with RCA, starting a remarkable run on the country radio charts. According to the Country Music Hall of Fame, Alabama had eight No. 1 songs on the country charts between the spring of 1980 and the summer of 1982.

During that period, Alabama released the classic songs “Tennessee River” and “Mountain Music,” which they continued to perform for many years after. They also released the pop crossover singles “Love In The First Degree” and “Feels So Right.”

And following this early 1980s rocket start, success continued unabated. At least one Alabama song topped the country charts each year between 1980 and 1993. The group won numerous honors at that time, including five ACM Award Entertainer of the Year trophies between 1981 and 1985 and a three-year run as CMA Entertainer of the Year from 1982 to 1984.

Alabama demonstrated that an instrument-playing band could carve a route to country success unmatched by many musicians at the time in a city dominated by solo performers and vocal ensembles. On Thursday, April 6, 2017, in Nashville, Tennessee, members of Alabama Teddy Gentry, Jeff Cook, and Randy Owen are pictured from left to right.

“Country music was always about solo artists, and I think they capitalized on what the [o]utlaws had started, which was amassing a youth audience for the genre,” country music historian Robert K. Oermann said in 2017. He added, “Jeff was the instrumental wizard who could do fiddle and guitar.”

Cook performed fiddle, guitar, and keyboards on stage while layering backing vocals over the band’s mellow, enticing melodies. His music? Alabama’s song caused “people to start dancing all over the place,” according to Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Joe Galante, a former RCA executive who assisted in guiding Alabama’s career.

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Galante stated to the Tennessean in 2017 that “… while he wasn’t front and center all the time, his contributions really made a difference when you listen for the hook.” That is a sign of a record that will last for a very long time.

For some, Cook’s on-stage theatrics and relationship with other performers helped define the class of entertainers that would come after. Kenny Chesney, a country music hitmaker who performed with Alabama at the beginning of his career, praised Cook and the band for being “so generous with wisdom” during the singer’s formative years.

“[Alabama] showed a kid in a t-shirt that country music could be rock, could be real, could be someone who looked like me,” Chesney said Tuesday. “Growing up in East Tennessee gave me the heart to chase this dream.”

Alabama came back together in 2011 for a charity show that benefited tornado victims in the band’s namesake state, following a first goodbye tour that ended in 2004. Cook put out a few solo albums while he was gone from Alabama.

He collaborated with “Star Trek” actor William Shatner and Charlie Daniels on songs that were released while on tour with his All-Star Goodtime Band. Cook joined Alabama in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005, entering the exclusive group of country musicians.

During the CMA Awards show at the Grand Ole Opry House on October 13, 1986, pop icon Lionel Richie, in the middle, delivers his song “Deep River Woman” with the assistance of Alabama members Randy Owen, on the left, and Jeff Cook. In 2013, Alabama celebrated its 40th anniversary and began traveling again.

Cook reduced band concerts four years later as a result of the persistent effects of his Parkinson’s illness. Around 2018, he ceased touring with Alabama. His bandmates said they made sure his equipment was ready before every gig as of 2019 in case he decided to take the stage, according to a statement to the Tennessean.

He co-wrote the song “No Bad Days” for a 2015 return album, and it eventually acquired new significance for the Hall of Fame musician.

“After I got the Parkinson’s diagnosis, people would quote the song to me and say, ‘No bad days,'” Cook told The Tennessean in 2019. “They write me letters, notes, and emails, and they sign ‘No Bad Days.’ I know the support is there. They join me. People I don’t know come up to me and say, ‘How ya feeling?’ You just got to live it every day and take it as it comes. Prayer does work. And I know there was a lot of praying going on.”

Cook’s wife of 27 years, Lisa Cook, is left behind. His family requests donations to the Jeff and Lisa Cook Foundation, a charity that works to spread awareness of Parkinson’s disease, in place of flowers. A memorial service program will be unveiled later.