West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, Class of 2011
Jimmy’s Army Buddy | Jimi’s Favorite Bass Player | Member of the legendary Band of Gypsys | With the passing of his two fellow Gypsys, Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles; Billy Cox is truly…
The Last Gypsy Standing: Billy Cox
The First Meeting – Billy Cox & Jimmy Hendrix. US Army, Fort Campbell, Kentucky
On a rainy night in the summer of 1961, Army serviceman and West Virginia native, Billy Cox was returning to his quarters after seeing a John Wayne movie in the mess hall. To get out of the rain, he and a friend headed toward nearby, Service Club #2. As they approached, they could hear a solo guitar being played in a furious fashion that was loud, dynamic, fluid and funky. Billy Cox was captivated right away. “Listen to that guy play! Damn!”, Cox told his friend. “I am listening,” the friend replied, “It sounds like shit.” Billy Cox didn’t hear it that way.
Once inside the club they could hear and see the solo, left-handed, guitar player jamming by himself, to a mostly empty room. He never looked up while his fingers were busy filling the club with bursts of guitar chords, lead lines, and string bending effects. His buddy still heard just noise, but Billy Cox heard an amazing guitar player who seemed to want to play every note, all at once, and have it sound distinctive and original.
Cox has said about this first meeting: “When he went up the guitar neck, I could hear Bach and Beethoven. When he came down the neck I could hear Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Then he would weave the classical and blues forms and notes together, to blow your mind with something nobody had ever heard or played before. I had to meet this guy.”
During a break, 20-year old Billy Cox, from Wheeling, West Virginia introduced himself to fellow serviceman, 19-year old Jimmy Hendrix, from Seattle, Washington. Thus began a legendary musical partnership, and a deep personal friendship between the two men that would last from that rainy evening in 1961, until Jimi Hendrix’s death nine years later, in September of 1970.
This friendship and partnership would take them from working together on the “Chitlin Circuit” in the deep south in the early 1960s, to playing together at the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival in August of 1969, before over 300,000 people. Five months later, along with Buddy Miles, they debuted as The Band of Gypsys, playing 4 shows over New Years Eve/Day at the Fillmore East in New York City. According to Rolling Stone magazine in 1987, these shows rank as one of the “10 Most Influential Concerts of All Time”.
Today Billy Cox is 83 years old and living in Nashville, TN. Over the years, with the passing of Hendrix in 1970, and Buddy Miles in 2008, Billy Cox is truly, The Last Gypsy Standing. This is his story.
West Virginia Roots
Billy Cox was born in Wheeling, WV, on October 18, 1941. His mother, LaVern (Campbell) was a classical pianist, and his father, the Reverend James Cox, was a seminary graduate on his way to becoming a military chaplain.
Cox has always said, “I believe I chose my parents.” But even though he was raised in a loving home, his parents divorced when Billy was just three.. He explained to The Nashville Musician in a 2020 interview: “I was almost like a latchkey kid until I was about seven or eight, but I still had a good life and enjoyed it. Music was a guiding force, because our house in Wheeling had a baby grand piano, and I found myself listening to Brahms, Mozart, Handel, Liszt, Gershwin, and the whole bit. My mother could play it all.”
Cox’s mother and two of her brothers played as a combo, often rehearsing in the house. “Sometimes they would get a drummer and that combo really enlightened me. It was a great influence.”
Later, Cox moved to live with his father, recently discharged from the service. The move brought a new discipline to his life, but music continued to drive him and it became his focus.. His father ultimately remarried, but still managed to connect with his son by teaching him harmonica, and seeing to it Billy had piano and violin lessons. He eventually lost interest in both. “I didn’t want to carry a violin case and stuff, and I was out there in a tough neighborhood near Grandview Park and going to Wheeling’s Lincoln School.”
His grandfather lived nearby on Grandview Street, but to get there Cox recalled, “You had to go up fifty flights of steps if you were going to walk to his house. A lot of times there were clouds up there, we were so high up. There were clouds on the hills in West Virginia.”
Young Billy Cox also found out there were radio waves in those clouds. As he tells it:
“My father had a calling for the church, and I couldn’t bring the worldly music into the house because, to my father, that was the music of the devil. He was a Baptist. I respected it.”
“So I built a crystal radio set out of a cigar box, with a five foot electrical cord. But now I had to buy the earphones. So I mowed a bunch of lawns, bought the earphones, plugged them in with the antenna, jumped on my bed, and lo and behold the first thing I heard was ‘This is Hoss Allen, downtown Nashville, Tennessee, WLAC – 50,000 watts of clear channel.’ Whoa! Jimmy Reed, BB King, The Drifters, Etta James, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
While that radio became his gateway to a greater universe of music, he also embraced another amazing source of music which was literally, closer to home. He lived two blocks from the site of the Wheeling Jamboree, broadcast on WWVA, the second-oldest country music broadcast in the US, behind the Grand Ole Opry.
Cox remembers, “A lot of times we’d sit out there on a Saturday night and we could hear great country music, live. Hawkshaw Hawkins, Johnny Cash, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, Doc Williams, you name it. That was raw stuff. Right on it. From our back alley viewpoint we could see the performers sneaking drinks and liquor between sets. I was influenced by that country music. So now in my musical arsenal I had classical, blues, R&B, music from church and I had the WWVA Jamboree.”
Billy Cox had a very versatile musical skill set by the time he entered junior high. He says, “I started off on the violin, then the piano. Then I got in the marching band and played the saxophone for about three years. Finally, I moved to Pittsburgh and played trumpet and saxophone.”
Pittsburgh – High School & Finding His Instrument
Though Cox could play a variety of instruments well, he still kept searching for the one instrument he could focus on, and master. He explains, “All that time I was playing, I was never getting satisfaction out of the instruments. It was just something that was in my soul and in my spirit, that I knew there was something I was supposed to play, but I never did get a hold of what it was.”
Finally in 1959, his senior year at Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School, he found his instrument for life. As he recalled in a Experience Hendrix interview. “One night after high school band practice, I was down the street near the Syria Mosque, in the Oakland section. Suddenly I could hear the resonance of this bass guitar resounding through the universe. ‘That’s it! That’s it’. I told a buddy. I had heard some magic happening in the universe. It reverberated through my whole body.”
“I ran down to the show, bought a ticket and found out it was Lloyd Price’s band doing a sound check. The band was playing Price’s big hit ‘Personality’. When they took a break I introduced myself to the bass player. I was 17-years old, and that was the first electric bass I ever saw. He let me try it on. I stayed and watched them play three sets. I was hooked.”
It was in Pittsburgh that Cox began to explore and enjoy jazz music. Local players like Art Blakey, Erroll Garner, and Ahmad Jamal were influential, and his high school record collection included music by Charlie Mingus, Ron Carter, and Ray Charles.
But even as he gathered these versatile musical talents and began to think of music as a career, Cox also felt a pull toward the military, given his father’s background and his own desire to make some money. After graduating high school, he joined the Army with the intent of becoming a parachutist. After basic training, he was able to choose the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, a base that straddled the Kentucky and Tennessee borders for his jump training. A fortuitous decision, which brings us back to the opening of this piece, in which Billy Cox was about to meet another parachutist from the 101st Airborne, Jimmy Hendrix.
1961 – The Army & Playing Music with Jimmy Hendrix
Billy Cox remembers his first meeting with Hendrix way, “His playing was so unique, I had to introduce myself. I complimented his playing and I told him I played a little bass, but wasn’t very good yet. He said he was learning too (yeah, right) and told me how to use my service card to sign out an amplifier and a bass. I went to the desk, turned in my card, and bang, I had a little cheap Silvertone set up to practice with. I set up in the room with Jimmy and it was magic right away. I can’t explain it. The destiny was there.”
The first song they played was “Soul Twist”, an instrumental by sax great, King Curtis. It clicked. They put a band together, The Kasuals, with drummer Gary Ferguson and played clubs in nearby Clarksville, TN such as The Jolly Roger and The Pink Poodle. In late 1961 Cox bought his first Fender bass, a Precision.
Late in 1962 after leaving the Army, Cox and Hendrix moved to nearby Nashville and became The King Kasuals. They found a regular gig at a new club, the Del Morocco. The gig provided free room and board, upstairs, above the club, and each band member would be paid $35 a week. They played five nights a week and slowly became a solid, powerhouse band.
Cox also found a little daytime, Nashville session work and while on a session, he met Hoss Allen, the legendary WLAC disc jockey he had heard as a boy over the airwaves from his bed in Wheeling.
That connection led to important work for Cox. From 1962 to 1968, he played on two television shows, broadcast from Dallas, Texas and Nashville, featuring the best R&B, pop and soul performers of the day. “The!!! Beat”, came from Nashville and was hosted by Allen. In Dallas, Noble Blackwell hosted “Night Train”. Both of these shows, predecessors of the influential “Soul Train”, provided Cox with the chance to work with stars such as Sam Cooke, Slim Harpo, Percy Sledge, Lou Rawls, Etta James, Irma Thomas, and so many more.
The King Kasuals kept busy on the “Chitlin Circuit”, and traveled throughout the southeast playing small clubs and bars. It was during this time that Hendrix’s guitar playing began to get noticed by other rhythm & blues acts on the circuit. Even at this early stage Hendrix was quite a showman, and capable of stealing any set with his flashy playing.
Hendrix eventually left Nashville for the road, while Cox stayed behind in Nashville, and put together a decent life as a working musician. Hendrix made a life in New York City’s Greenwich Village and would work and tour with the Isley Brothers, Curtis Knight, Little Richard and Joey Dee & The Starlighters.
In 1966 Jimi Hendrix was “discovered” by Chas Chandler, and the plan was to take Hendrix to Chandler’s native England to put together a band, a look, and sound built around this amazing, exotic guitar player. Before Jimi left for England he called Billy and asked him to join him. As Cox “only had three strings on my bass and no money to travel to New York”, he turned Hendrix down and wished him well.
Very soon, Jimi Hendrix became one of the biggest rock stars of all time. The Jimi Hendrix Experience released three very successful albums, but by 1969, bassist Noel Redding had decided to leave the group. Again, Hendrix turned to Cox, asking him to replace Redding as his bassist, and join him in upstate New York where he was workshopping a new band. The new, larger,“experimental” group, informally called “Gypsy Sun and Rainbows” played at Woodstock, where Billy Cox helped Jimi Hendrix deconstruct the “National Anthem”.
After Woodstock, Hendrix disbanded the larger group, which had included Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, and decided to go back to the trio format but this time with Billy Cox on bass, and, another friend, Buddy Miles on drums. These three rehearsed for several weeks before debuting as “The Band Of Gypsys” on New Year’s Eve, 1969, at the Fillmore East in New York City. They played 2 shows on December 31, 1969, and 2 shows on New Year’s Day, 1970. The live album from these shows “Band of Gypsys” was recognized as one of the 10 Most Influential Concerts in Rock History, by Rolling Stone magazine in 1987.
However, in early 1970 Buddy Miles was fired, and Mitch Mitchell rejoined the Hendrix family. At this point Billy, Jimi, and Mitch Mitchell began a tour as “The Cry of Love Band”. This configuration played some historic shows in Hawaii, Berkeley, and the Isle of Wight.
On the European swing of the tour, Bill Cox got very sick from some bad acid and became catatonic, and couldn’t speak. First hospitalized in Germany, Cox was later taken to London where Hendrix arranged for his care and housing. Jimi Hendrix also cancelled the rest of the sold out tour. He could have easily found a bass player for those shows, but he decided to pull the plug on the tour and take care of his friend.
In a few weeks Cox was able to fly back to the states for more treatment. Two weeks after Billy Cox left London, his friend Jimi Hendrix died of a drug overdose. Cox has said he was knocked for a loop and he felt totally lost in the world without Jimi Hendrix in his life.
He went on to play with the Charlie Daniels Band, JJ Cale, and Buddy Miles. In 1995, Cox began participating in Hendrix tributes and tours. In 1997 Cox worked on “First Rays of the New Rising Sun”, Hendrix’s fourth album that was cut off by his death.
In 2004, he reunited again with Buddy Miles to re-record songs from the original live album of 1970 with guitarists Eric Gales and Gary Serkin. “The Band of Gypsys Return” was released in 2006.
Besides his induction in the WV Music Hall of Fame in 2011, Cox was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2009. Cox was also inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame, in Detroit, in 2019.
Today Billy Cox is 83 years old and living in Nashville, TN.
Billy Cox was more to Jimi Hendrix than a bass player. He was a great friend, a fellow Army serviceman and parachutist, and a damn fine musician who could hang, be it musically or socially with the greatest guitarist of all time. Not a small feat. Cox anchored the music, and in some ways he anchored Jimi Hendrix. I’ll leave the final words to David Henderson, a noted biographer of Jimi Hendrix.
“Billy Cox has arrived within Jimi’s music. Billy’s bass lines often have the feel of Charlie Mingus playing bottom runs. As a player, he always knows when to get out of the way. Billy Cox is terse and tough. He covers the bottom without any yearnings for the top. He has an understated funk groove that is so subtle that even when he gets into off-tonalities, it all flows in a fluid groove. He can rev and snarl, strut and talk, and never blow the groove. His steady jazzlike presence fuses the wide range of tonals on the bottom shelf together. And that was just what Jimi wanted so he could have complete freedom on top: a steady and consistent, yet creative, bottom presence.”
From the book: “Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimi Hendrix.”
SOURCES:
- ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimi Hendrix. David Henderson 1978.
- Becoming Jimi Hendrix. Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber 2010.
- Jimi Hendrix Experience. Com
- BillyCox.com
- Wheeling/Ohio County Historical Society.
- Nashvillle Musicians. com
RECOMMENDED LISTENING – by the author.
Recommended Listening.
- “Earth Blues” – Jimi Hendrix. This is a great song to show off the skill set of Billy Cox. This joyous jam moves through blues, rock, soul, and gospel while Cox shows off his many moves on the bass. Turn it up.
- “Who Knows” – Band of Gypsys. The opening song from the classic “Band of Gypsys” live album. This was truly a “band of brothers”. Soul brothers as these three had chops and experience at playing soul and R&B. Buddy Miles had toured with Wilson Pickett. Billy Cox had played with dozens of soul legends during his TV show session work. And Hendrix had played with the Isleys and Little Richard. A very different band then the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
- “Ezy Rider”. Another good showcase for the talents of Billy Cox. This song really soars. Ezy Ryder
- “Them Changes”- Band of Gypsys. Another cut from the live album featuring vocals by Buddy Miles on a driving, funky, soul song he wrote. Hendrix does some excellent work with his wah-wah pedal that takes the piece to the next level. Changes (Live)
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