Mike Cooley, Southern Gothic Storyteller, Mesmerizes White Water Tavern Crowd

by Julian Spivey

Aprille Hanson-Spivey Photo

Mike Cooley, one of the double-headed monster that makes up Drive-By Truckers, appeared at The White Water Tavern in Little Rock, Ark., for the second of a two-night gig on Saturday, Dec. 21, for an evening of some of his finest penned songs, just him and his guitar.
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Cooley has a song called “Filthy and Fried,” which appeared on the Truckers' critically acclaimed 2016 album American Band. The phrase is excellent for his general music brand — a look into Southern American life's dark and seedy side.

Cooley performed 18 songs on Saturday night, highlighting his output with the Drive-By Truckers. Don’t worry if you’re a fan of the band. They’re still together. Every year around the holidays, the songwriting/frontman duo of Cooley and Patterson Hood take time out of their busy touring schedule as a band to do solo shows across the country. This was Cooley’s first trip to The White Water Tavern, a small room with a lot of heart and memories.

Cooley opened the show with “Maria’s Awful Disclosures,” off the band’s most recent album, Welcome 2 Club XIII, from 2022.

He would perform a song from almost every Truckers’ album over the band’s nearly 30 years, with the exceptions being 2010’s The Big To-Do and the dual 2020 releases of The Unraveling and The New OK, the latter two of which were written mainly by Hood.

Among my favorite performances of the evening were “Gravity’s Gone,” from 2008’s A Blessing and a Curse, and “Marry Me,” from 2003’s Decoration Day, both of which I’d heard done with the full band previously.

My favorite of the evening was “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” off 2004’s The Dirty South, which is one of my favorite Truckers songs, and I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing them do it live. The song tells of the riches that came to the artists who recorded for Sam Phillips’ Sun Records and how Perkins, the original performer of “Blue Suede Shoes,” got the short shrift.

Cooley is a frank songwriter. The short stories he tells in a musical form never shy away from the darkness of the world. However, he can also wring beauty out of the songs simultaneously, like with the line: “They’ll be after me by the time the buffet closes/making sure Sin City still shines brighter than creation’s dark,” from “Checkout Time in Vegas.”

While nobody would ever accuse Cooley of having the world’s finest singing voice, his Southern growl perfectly brings out all of the character in the character-rich stories he tells, like “Cottonseed,” about a local gangster who brags about putting more lawmen in the ground than Alabama has cottonseed or “Uncle Frank,” about a veteran who buys land cheap and gets screwed out of it by the government leaving suicide as his best option.

When done with a full band, the performances are a sight to behold – it’s a kickass rock show - but when it’s just Cooley and his guitar, you realize you’re watching one of the best Southern Gothic short story writers around – the poignancy truly hitting home.