Elizabeth Cook

americana · bluegrass · roots

Elizabeth Cook is an American country and Americana singer-songwriter based in Nashville, born July 18, 1972 in Wildwood, Florida as the youngest of twelve children. Music ran through the household: her mother Joyce played mandolin and guitar on radio and television, and her father Thomas played string instruments, including upright bass in a prison band while serving a sentence tied to moonshining. Cook graduated from Georgia Southern University in 1996 with degrees in accounting and computer information systems and moved to Nashville to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers before turning to music full time, spending years sleeping on the floor of a publishing house. She self-released The Blue Album in 2000, then recorded Hey Y'all for Warner Bros. in 2002 and This Side of the Moon for Hog County in 2004. Balls (2007) and Welder (2010) followed on Thirty Tigers, both made with longtime collaborator Rodney Crowell, and Welder drew an Americana Music Association Album of the Year nomination in 2011. Later records include Exodus of Venus (2016) and Aftermath (2020) on her own Agent Love imprint, and Great Television (2026) on Thirty Tigers. Cook made her Grand Ole Opry debut on March 17, 2000 and has since logged more than 400 appearances there, the most by any performer who has never been inducted as an Opry member. She hosts Elizabeth Cook's Apron Strings, a daily program on SiriusXM's Outlaw Country channel, has hosted the fishing series Upstream with Elizabeth Cook on the Circle network, and voices the character Tammi on Adult Swim's Squidbillies. Repeated appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman beginning in 2011 widened her audience well beyond country radio. She has recorded and performed with Dwight Yoakam, Buddy Miller, Jason Isbell and Carlene Carter, appearing on Carter's 2014 album Carter Girl, and won the Ameripolitan Music Awards' Outlaw Female category in 2014. Her writing leans on plainspoken narrative and dark humor drawn from rural Florida, and her sets range from full honky-tonk band arrangements to stripped-down acoustic performances.

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