When Jeff Cook lost the ability to cast a fishing lure on Lake Guntersville in 2012, he initially told himself the stiffness in his arm was nothing more than a pinched nerve. Soon the problem followed him onto the stage, making it harder to cleanly hit the electric guitar solos and rapid fiddle runs he had played from memory for four decades alongside his cousins Randy Owen and Teddy Gentry.
Owen and Gentry privately worried their bandmate had suffered a minor stroke. When neurology tests confirmed Parkinson’s disease instead, the three co-founders of Alabama agreed to keep the diagnosis inside their immediate circle so Cook could stay in his familiar spot on the right side of the stage without turning every concert into a medical watch.
That quiet pact came naturally to three men whose musical partnership started in the Lookout Mountain region around Fort Payne, Alabama, long before Nashville labels knew their names. Born in Fort Payne on August 27, 1949, Cook picked up the guitar at thirteen and earned a commercial broadcast engineer license just three days after his fourteenth birthday, hosting a local radio show while still attending Fort Payne High School.
While Owen and Gentry had grown up harmonizing in rural churches and farming on the flat-topped mountain, Cook brought a rock-and-roll edge from local teen bands and a formal degree in electronic technology from Gadsden. In the summer of 1969, the three cousins teamed up under the name Young Country, entering a local high school talent contest and landing a weekend job as the house band at Canyon Land Park near Little River Canyon.
By 1972, after Owen and Cook finished college, the cousins moved into a shared apartment in Anniston, Alabama, renamed the group Wildcountry, and decided to pursue music full-time. The early years tested how much hardship they were willing to absorb together.
In March 1973, Wildcountry loaded their gear and headed to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to audition as the summer house band at a weathered oceanfront tavern called The Bowery. For the next seven summers, they played six nights a week for tips and a modest cut of the bar gate, covering everything from Merle Haggard to Lynyrd Skynyrd while scraping by on Vienna sausages and boxes of crackers.
During those marathon nights in South Carolina, Cook developed the versatility that earned him the nickname “Mr. Energy,” switching seamlessly between a double-neck guitar, fiddle, keyboards, and bass while engineering the group’s independent cassettes out of the back of their van. After adopting the name Alabama in 1977 and signing with RCA Records in 1980, that three-part cousin harmony and Cook’s blend of country fiddle and Southern rock guitar propelled the group to twenty-seven consecutive number-one singles during the 1980s, over seventy-five million albums sold, and a 2005 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
When Parkinson’s began slowing his hands in 2012, Cook relied on the same work ethic that had carried them through the Myrtle Beach bar circuit. For five years, Owen and Gentry adjusted the pace of their live shows whenever needed while Cook pushed through the physical toll behind an easy grin.
By April 2017, the tremors had grown too pronounced to disguise under arena lights, prompting Cook to share his diagnosis publicly and step back from the regular touring grind. Even then, he refused to walk away completely, telling fans he did not want to take a spotlight away from the songs and promising to appear whenever his body cooperated.
Through physical therapy and vocal exercises, Cook worked to rejoin his cousins when Alabama launched their 50th Anniversary Tour. Although the schedule faced delays from both Owen’s vertigo treatments in 2019 and the global pandemic, the milestone run resumed on July 2 and July 3, 2021, with two sold-out nights at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena—the first full-capacity concerts in the venue in sixteen months.
On select stops across that anniversary run, Cook walked back out under the stage lights, taking a seat in a chair near his old position to trade notes and vocal lines with Owen and Gentry one more time.
Those guest appearances proved to be his final chapter on the road. On November 7, 2022, ten years after his initial diagnosis, Cook died peacefully at his home in Destin, Florida, at age seventy-three, with his wife of twenty-seven years, Lisa Williams, and family beside him.
When Owen and Gentry continued carrying Alabama’s music forward with Cook’s blessing, the right side of the stage remained linked to the cousin from Fort Payne who spent five quiet years hiding his tremors just to keep the family band intact.