Nashville is a big city that sometimes feels like a small town—connections everywhere. Tonight, Music City paid tribute to one of those connectors. Peter Cooper, whose died last December at 52, could not be easily encapsulated. He was a journalist, singer-songwriter, and since 2014, senior director of the Country Music Hall of Fame. As the stories shared tonight in the theatre of the Hall revealed, he was so much more to so many people.
The evening opened with a tribute video by Nashville filmmaker Molly Secours, which started with the traditional “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today—” abruptly interrupted by “He would hate that.” She vocalized what everyone was thinking: “We all wish we weren’t here today.” The video set the tone for the evening—sincere loss flavored by humor—highlighting not only Cooper the musician and journalist, but the husband, father, brother, son, friend—and Atlanta Braves baseball fan. She noted, “He never met a story he couldn’t make longer.”
Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, welcomed the crowd and adding his own stirring words, noted that Cooper began his career in South Carolina as a high school teacher and was “above all, always a teacher at heart.” He turned over the mic to Peter’s brother Chris Cooper, who shared the hosting duties with Cooper’s friends and bandmates Thomm Jutz and Eric Brace.
Charlie Worsham opened the first set singing Cooper’s song “Opening Day.” Chris noted that Peter liked to say, “All my songs are really about baseball—except my baseball songs.” Andrea Zonn, who played fiddle and sang harmony with the house band, also performed a swing tune with a baseball theme as well, for which Cooper wrote lyrics, “Another Swing and a Miss.”
Also filling out the house band with Jutz, Brace, and Zonn were Mark Fain on bass, Jen Gunderman on keys, and Lynn Silliams on drums.
Cooper’s affinity for Tom T. Hall was another recurring theme through the evening. As his brother noted, Peter made sure Hall’s song “I Love” was the first song his son Baker heard when he was born. Buddy Miller, who sang “Sneaky Snake” on the Grammy-nominated children’s album I Love: Tom T. Hall’s Songs of Fox Hollow, produced by Cooper and Brace, performed another of Hall’s songs “That’s How I Got to Memphis.”
For anyone who knew Cooper at all, it was no surprise to see Emmylou Harris in the lineup. She joined Jim Lauderdale on harmony for “The King of Broken Hearts” and then sang one of her own songs Cooper loved, “Boulder to Birmingham.” She was joined by her former backup singer Fayssoux Starling, whom Cooper discovered through his obsession reading liner notes. Fayssoux also sang “I Can’t Wait,” the title track of her second solo album, recorded after Peter talked her back into the studio.
The night featured Jason Ringenberg of Jason and the Scorchers, as his alter ego Farmer Jason, playing a lively rendition of the Christmas song he co-wrote with Cooper, “All I Want for Christmas”—in this case, not “my two front teeth” but “a punk rock skunk.”
Baker Maultsby, Cooper’s long-time friend since college days, offered his remembrance, reinforcing the words used throughout the evening to describe his friend—kindness, passion, connector. He noted that Peter was idealistic, “but he always backed it up by doing the work.”
“Whispering Bill” Anderson told the audience, “I was not supposed to be there tonight.” He said he should have been at the Braves’ spring training with Cooper, describing their last phone conversation, less than an hour before the accident that took Cooper’s life. After singing a duet of “Someday It’ll All Make Sense” with Zonn, Anderson revealed that Cooper had told him in that same conversation that he wanted to write a book about the man he considered not only the greatest Braves player but the greatest baseball player ever. That man, Dale Murphy, was in the audience.
Don Schlitz, wearing his Duke cap that Peter despised “more than he hated pedal taverns on Lower Broadway,” performed their co-write “Suffer a Fool,” and bluegrass singer-songwriter Irene Kelley performed “Feels Like Home,” co-written with Cooper on a rainy day in Nashville. As Brace noted, though, most of the songs performed were not Cooper’s songs. Peter was such a “singular singer,” Brace said, that people should instead look for his recordings of his own songs. For much of the evening, singers and songwriters performed songs Cooper had loved.
One of those was songs he loved was John Prine’s “Souvenirs,” which Brace said Cooper always sang for sound check, whether playing a house concert of the Ryman. They also played Eric Taylor’s “All the Way to Heaven,” one of the only two songs Cooper didn’t write from his 2008 album Mission Door. Zonn, Brace, and Jutz performed Seldom Scene’s song “Wait a Minute,” which Eric and Peter recorded for their Master Sessions album with that band’s dobro player on dobro and pedal steel great Lloyd Green.
Even though the evening’s “Dearly Beloved” intro was cut short, Cooper’s father, the Reverend Wiley Cooper closed with a benediction, acknowledging the gift the evening represented to Cooper’s family, the outpouring of love. “Because of your love and your care,” he told the crowd,” you made it possible or all of us who loved him to smile through our tears.”