It’s so easy to look at Elizabeth Cook’s porcelain skin, flaxen hair and fine bones and make assumptions that she was born into Nashville’s version of royalty-in-waiting.
If you go
Elizabeth Cook with Iris Dement
Where: The Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday
Info: $35; ticketmaster.com
But push aside her supermodel looks, lilting laugh and array of household-name friends and you find someone very different than perhaps who you expected. “My mom was a hillbilly singer from West Virginia … and my dad was in prison for running moonshine with the mob and he played upright bass in a prison band,” Cook said, beginning her story. “When he was released they discovered each other and started playing [music] together and before long they had a bar band and were playing clubs and bars around central Florida.”
From those modest beginnings Cook, whose parents each had five children when they married, left a major career in a “big six” accounting firm and became a songwriter on Nashville’s famed Music Row before she became a musical performer in her own right.
As you might imagine, the road wasn’t easy. Although Cook’s parents got her involved in music with them when she was a child, she soon asked them to let her out of the routine, wanting to spend time with her friends rather than sing in clubs and record records.
Her interest in music reignited after she decided an accounting career wasn’t for her and she landed a job songwriting on Music Row. There she began to discover and immerse herself in the music of Rodney Crowell and Lucinda Williams, discovering the artistry of those and other writers’ work.
Although a major record deal for Cook to perform was soon signed, she asked to be let out of the contract.
“I kind of blindsided them when I asked to be released from my deal,” Cook said. “I had to be honest and do my craft with no expectations on me from people speaking crazy money. I have to have a lot of freedom in order to be creative.”
The formula worked. Her 2007 album “Balls” was a critical and popular success and her just-released album “Welder” — featuring guest stints by Crowell and Dwight Yoakam — is poised to follow suit.
“I’ve had a crazy life and not everyone has had a crazy life. They work day in and day out in the same job and in the same town,” said Cook of her motivation. “It’s great when someone feels they can relate and identify with my music.”
