Who was/is Ricky Cook ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Ricky Cook
Ricky Cook had a yearning for music when he was just 8 years old. He soon found out that not only did he receive a natural gift from his songwriting grandmother, but also some good advice when he asked her how to write songs. She told him, “It’s easy, tell a story and just make the ends rhyme”. Young Ricky didn’t think otherwise. He took her words to heart and pursued his new-found passion, jotting down words and creating poems out of them.
He wrote about his family, his friends and the east Tennessee landscape in which he grew up. Oakdale, Tennessee was as rural of an area as Butcher Hollow, Kentucky and Sevierville, Tennessee; the two one-horse towns that his childhood idols Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton hailed from. His family wasn’t in quite the same financial state as those two growing up but would definitely be considered a family that worked hard for their money. His dad was a coal miner and his mom a hair dresser. They were just down to earth, hard-working, country folk but they always considered themselves blessed.
Today Oakdale still has the K-12 school that Ricky Cook attended. He graduated with only 27 other classmates. He considered college but didn’t like school much so most of his lessons were to come from his parents and a diploma from that infamous ‘School of Hard Knocks. Ricky learned to mop floors, do dishes, chop wood and much more from an early age. After high school he perfected his work ethic through several jobs including his dad’s rock quarry and a local car dealership. There was no getting around hard work. The Cook Family Golden Rule was . . . “You’re gonna work . . . with or without ass busted.” Ricky did both.
A couple of years later, Ricky saw an ad in Country Music Magazine that read, mail your song in. Ricky always knew he had a different way of thinkin’ than that of his fellow classmates. They didn’t think of life much outside of Oakdale, but Ricky never thought anything was to impossible for himself. So, he decided this was the time to follow his dream . . . his passion. After all, he wasn’t getting any younger. He was closing in on 22. It was time to head to Nashville, to the big time. He left Oakdale and went straight to Music Row. The way he tells it, heck he stayed the whole weekend. He learned a lot in 72 hours. There’s always a smiling person at the front door on Music Row. Their job is to keep the door shut! He says he was simply looking for a warm body with two ears to say, “Hey kid, I think you’re a star!” Unfortunately, the only voices he heard on that trip shouted, “Thanks but no thanks . . . you need to get back in that car.” “That’s pretty good but we already got a Randy Travis”.
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