Tony Cook (musician)

Tony Cook is a dance music producer and former drummer for James Brown.

James Brown discovered Tony Cook playing at a block party for the WRDW-AM radio station Brown owned in his childhood hometown of Augusta, Georgia. Cook was an Augusta native who began drumming in his early teens, learning full albums by the likes of Brown, Al Green, Rufus Thomas, Wilson Pickett and Kool & the Gang, and playing in backing bands for touring artists such as Geater Davis and Z.Z. Hill. “He sat in with us and he took for granted that we knew the songs,” Cook says of his first encounter with the legendary Godfather of Soul. “So we played, and from his expression [it seemed] he was a little bit surprised that we could play so well. We were just a bunch of kids. Maybe the oldest one of us was 17. I think I was 15.”

Cook finished high school and was gigging in and around Augusta with a local group called the Liberty Band when Brown and running partner Bobby Byrd were in attendance for a bill the group shared with comedian Clay Tyson. The Godfather had heard that Cook and company were the best outfit in town, and on the strength of their performance that night, hired the crew as his opening act in December 1975. In the early part of 1976, Brown began to retool the JBs and brought Cook aboard as his new drummer, a position the 18-year-old would hold off and on for the next thirty years.

The hiring came when Brown’s career was in decline. As work slowed, Cook joined Etta James’s band, opening for the Rolling Stones and supporting Taj Mahal, James Booker, and Willie Mabon at the 1978 Montreux Jazz Festival before returning to Brown later that year. He stayed with Brown for the next two years until receiving an offer from producer Frank Farian to bring his band Sky Train to Germany and back Jamaican-born vocalist Precious Wilson. After working with Farian, Cook moved to London and went independent, scoring a deal in 1981 with Osceola Records and producing the first Tony Cook and the Party People singles. The next year, he began working with the Halfmoon label, releasing “Do What You Wanna Do” and later, the seminal “On the Floor” and “On the Floor (Rock-It)” mixes by WBLS-FM DJs Timmy Regisford and Boyd Jarvis.

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