Add some music to your day

I’ve been thinking about starting an occasional series of posts to feature artists or songs or cover versions of songs you are unlikely to have heard before but likely to enjoy if you give them a listen. Musical themes have been running through my mind all day via Power Line posts. Paul Mirengoff gives us Chuck Hagel, who is channeling songwriter P.F. Sloane’s “Eve of Destruction” (“The Eastern world,” you may recall, “it is exploding”) and John Hinderaker, who is adapting Joe Raposo’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green” to his own uses (Van Morrison covers the song on his Hard Nose the Highway).

I would like to introduce you to Alison Krauss faves the Cox Family. In the video below, Ms. Alison herself introduces the family to sing “I Was Standing By the Bedside of a Neighbor,” the old-timey gospel song written by Roosevelt Fennoy. I believe that everyone in the video is a member of the family but for the bass player.

Together with those lilting voices, the bass carries the song. I think it’s the late Roy Huskey, Jr. Victor Krauss, alive and well on bass but I may well be mistaken. If I’m wrong, I hope someone will correct me in the comments. (I was wrong.) The recorded version of the song leads off the Cox Family disc Everybody’s Reaching Out for Someone; of that I am sure.

Ms. Alison produced and arranged the disc. She vouches for the family: “They can’t be compared to anyone — they’ve created something in Cotton Valley, Louisiana that is incredibly special. When you reach the Pearly Gates, they’ll be playing the Cox Family.”

UPDATE: Reader Michael Finn writes to help me out: “That’s Victor Krauss playing bass. He’s Alison’s brother and he is the regular bass player for Lyle Lovett.”

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