Jimmy Cole, equally adept at country, blues, rockabilly, and other forms of roots rock ‘n’ roll music, has been playing guitar and singing up and down the East Coast for close to 50 years. Based in Manassas, Virginia, he and I crossed paths over the years, but we only started working together in mid-2017, when I agreed to help him promote some of his self-penned songs.
Jimmy rightly calls his myriad styles “100 Proof American Blended Music.” Ripsaw is proud to have included a couple of his songs on “The Best of Ripsaw Records, Volume 5.” I invite you to take a couple of swigs of that “100 Proof.”
“Jukebox Living” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIQWT6yEATA
For the recording of this song in the summer of 1986, Jimmy engaged Buddy Charleton to play pedal steel guitar. Buddy had played steel for Country Music Hall of Famer Ernest Tubb as one of Ernest’s Texas Troubadours for over a decade in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. At a gig after the session, Buddy asked Jimmy, “Are you gonna play that jukebox song? Jimmy answered, “Sure, we can do that.” Buddy replied, “That’s my favorite song. If Ernest was alive, he’d record it.”
“I Called in Drunk Today” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXJkn65DXOI
At the time of recording this song, Jimmy was fronting a northern Virginia-based rockin’ roots band he called The Roadmasters. He used many of the Washington, D.C. area’s best known musicians to back him up at the session – Mark Wenner, Jimmy Thackery, and Jan Zukowski from the Nighthawks; Peter Bonta and Tommy Hannum from the Rosslyn Mountain Boys; Giles Cook from his own Roadmasters; and Wanda Dean from Wanda Dean and The Country Rockers, in whose band both Cook and he had worked. Cole and Thackery had also worked together in the early 1970’s in the Crawlin’ Kingsnake Blues Band, which later evolved into the Nighthawks and the Powerhouse Blues Band.
