Peter Cooper

An appreciation and an apology

Tonight, February 24, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, something really special and important is happening. I can’t be there. It sucks. So I’m going to put down some thoughts about Peter Cooper, who in addition to being all of these things, was my collaborator in audiobook production and someone I had the good fortune to call my friend. He and I were the same age. Now, he will always be just 52, too young to leave us all behind, as he did this past December.

Tonight is the celebration of Peter’s life at the CMHoF, organized by Peter’s dear friends Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz. If you’re in Nashville you really should go, if you can. Even if you didn’t know him, you will be reminded how one life touches so many others. I marvel at the interconnectedness of it all.

Under the heading of it being a small world, here’s how Ketch Secor leads to Peter Cooper and back to Ketch Secor and beyond. We used to live on Franklin Street in Harrisonburg, Virginia (aka the ‘burg). Down the street was the house where Ketch Secor, of the legendary group Old Crow Medicine Show, grew up. Young Ketch ended up at The Little Grill, a bohemian little hangout / eatery that used to host concerts in a room so tiny you had to watch out or you could get hit with a drumstick or a waving guitar neck. One thing led to another and now Ketch and his band are based in Nashville. Put a pin in that. I’ll get back to it.

The Secors moved out, Lauren & John moved in, and when they moved out, “BoWendy” from DC moved in (our toddler’s name for the couple which we still use). BoWendy were friends with Eric Brace, who had a band called Last Train Home up in DC. BW would always tell us about their friend and his band, and how one day maybe some local venue in the ‘burg would book them for a gig there. At some point, that happened, at Dave’s Taverna (which said toddler called Dave’s Reberna) which is now Jimmy Madison’s. The locals loved LTH and the ‘burg became a regular stop on their frequent tours.

Around that same time Eric was getting to know and writing songs with Peter Cooper out in Nashville, and they started touring as a duo, releasing a number of great albums on Eric’s Red Beet Records label. Some of their songs, originals and covers, would get folded into Last Train Home set lists, and one night in 2010 when LTH played at Clementine in the ‘burg, I realized a lifelong dream of being a harmony singer by standing in for Peter, singing his parts in the songs Wait A Minute and I Know A Bird. This is relevant I swear.

Some time later, Eric and Peter were coming through town, maybe playing down at Mockingbird in Staunton, and they must’ve stayed at BoWendy’s. I happened to catch them as they were heading out and they pulled to the curb a moment when I waved. Peter rolled down the window and said “hey I heard you sang my parts a while back.” I wasn’t sure what to say, not knowing him really—he had a penetratingly serious gaze—and my face must’ve been reddening when he added “I heard you were good” and smiled.

See, he wouldn’t have had to say something nice like that. I’ve known plenty of artist types whose reactions would’ve been territorial. But as I got to know Peter, it became apparent that he was one of the more generous artists - humans - I’ve had the privilege to know. It’s not an exaggeration to say he changed my life.

Around the time we met, I was getting underway in my audiobook narration career, and was interested in trying my hand as a producer / director of some titles. The Nashville connection seemed like an avenue worth pursuing, so I emailed Peter to ask if he could meet up the next time I was in town. He said sure, so we grabbed lunch (this was maybe 2013?) at a taco place not far from Vanderbilt, where he was teaching country music history. I believe he was still writing for the Tennessean at that time.

At lunch, Peter said the music memoir he loved more than any other was Tom T. Hall’s The Storyteller’s Nashville. He read it every year, he said, and had collaborated with Tom T. on a new version for which he’d written the preface. At that time, there was no audiobook.

We decided that day to make it happen. I found a supportive distributor in Blackstone Publishing, and Peter met with Tom T., who not only agreed to work with us but handed Peter a folder full of unfinished lyrics and poems in case they were of use (!). Peter also connected me with Thomm Jutz, a soft-spoken, immensely talented guitar player who had a studio outside of Nashville where we could record Peter’s narration.

In the spring and summer of 2014, the project came together. Peter went through the folder of material and chose pieces to use throughout the audiobook. We felt strongly that Tom T. himself should read those poems and lyrics, to weave The Storyteller’s voice into the final product. Peter and Thomm brought recording equipment out to Tom T’s Fox Hollow Farm to record his chapter openers. If you listen very closely, you’ll hear the occasional peacock screaming its way into audiobook immortality.

I flew out to Nashville to direct Peter’s narration sessions at TJTunes. We settled into an easy flow as I recall, me sitting with Thomm and listening as Peter told these stories he knew so well from all the times he’d sat with this book. He was relaxed, patient with himself, and seemed mostly to enjoy the process, though at the end of those days (as any narrator will tell you) he was fried and ready to rest his brain and voice. But he was so good.

The finishing touch, which became a feature of the projects Peter, Thomm and I worked on together, was the addition of Thomm’s absolutely gorgeous guitar playing to open the chapters. His solo guitar stands alone just as Tom T. and Peter’s voices do, and grounds the story of a singer-songwriter in an evocative sonic landscape.

We were so proud of that project (sample here and you can request your local library order a copy via Blackstone’s Library catalog program) and excited to embark on more collaborations. From 2014-2016 we worked on some really great Nashville-connected titles:

• Mary Miller’s short story collection Big World, narrated by a full cast of formidable singer-songwriters: Janis Ian, Mary Gauthier, Louise Mosrie, Amy Speace, and Telisha Williams. The author and I each took a turn as well, and I loved the way it came out. With the exception of Janis Ian, who I met at the Audies Gala in 2013 (she won for her narration of her memoir Society’s Child), guess who introduced me to these women? Yep, Peter Cooper and Thomm Jutz.

• Legend of the Road Mangler with Phil Kaufman.

• Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music by Barry Mazor, narrated by the author along with Grammy winning musicians Dom Flemons (Carolina Chocolate Drops) and—ta-da!— Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) and Marty Stuart, and featuring public domain recordings mentioned in the narrative.

• In It For The Long Run by Jim Rooney, read by the author.

• Whisperin’ Bill Anderson: An Unprecedented Life in Country Music read by the author and Peter Cooper.

Phil Kaufman, aka The Road Mangler, with Peter Cooper in 2015. Photo by Paul Schatzkin

Me & Thomm Jutz during the Mangler sessions at TJTunes

The audiobook production company I established as the umbrella for all of this work was called Lyric Audiobooks, i.e. the words to the music. At that time, I thought the company would continue to be focused on biographies and memoirs related to the music industry. These stories fascinate me because they combine the primal joy of music making with that salmon-swimming-upstream quest to earn a place among the best of the best.

Looking back, that was an intense period for both Peter’s and my careers. He had moved from The Tennessean over to the Country Music Hall of Fame where he was senior editor. He was still writing and recording songs, and working on his own book alongside all the other writing he was doing at work. He and I both had kiddos with increasingly busy schedules.

My narration schedule was getting so full, it was increasingly tough to justify taking a week here and there to produce these music-related projects, and the royalties we had hoped for never really materialized. My theory had been that touring musicians and music fans heading to festivals would love these music-connected titles, but as I’m fond of saying, it turns out they want John Grisham and Trevor Noah along with the rest of the audiobook listening audience. So the advances were getting smaller and smaller, and I was financing everything myself with not enough return to make any kind of business sense.

So here’s the part where I’m a complete asshole.

After all of this collaboration, after all the time and energy he gave me, what did I do when Peter’s book Johnny’s Cash and Charley’s Pride come out in 2017? Did I set aside time and a budget to make sure we recorded it as an audiobook? Of course I did! Not.

That’s a supremely shitty thing to do. And I did it. He mentioned his book was going to come out and asked about working together on the audiobook. I do remember looking into an advance for production costs and being told that there would be no advance this time. His publisher was not willing to fund it. I remember explaining to Peter that we would have to pay for the production ourselves, the likely up front cost, and maybe we should see how the print sales went first. Peter said he was doubtful he could get a big chunk of time off work anyway, and I said I’d have to direct remotely. We back-burnered the idea—no, we shelved it. On a high shelf in the basement. Behind the picnic basket that never gets used.

2017-20 was work family commitments tour schedule more work blah blah blah, and 2020…suffice to say we never came back to the idea, though we stayed in touch via email. When I was inducted into the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame in 2018 he sent me the kindest note. You set out to be great. And you are great. I’m really happy for you.

See? He didn’t have to say something nice like that. But that’s how Peter showed up for people. Everyone gathering at the memorial concert tonight has stories like this one. Peter was a connector of people to one another and to opportunities and seemed to take genuine joy in it. But now the center of a whole web of connection is gone. He is irreplaceable, his absence so much more obvious because his presence was so singular.

And for someone who loved to talk about his musical heroes, I am mystified that he didn’t seem to understand the way in which he himself was an extremely important and dear person to so many of us. His heroes Eric Taylor, John Prine and Tom T. Hall died in 2020 and 2021, and now Peter’s gone with them.

In our grief, how wonderful would it have been to hear his voice telling all of the stories in his signature dry and droll way, to picture his face when we heard him telling us all these things we didn’t know we needed to know about the lives and lore of legendary musicians? I can not believe I just blithely assumed we’d get around to it someday. I mean I can…we pretend all the time that tomorrow is guaranteed, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Better late than never, this is the year we finally get around to it. Planning is underway now. I’m still a shitty friend, but I’m not going to let that stand in the way.