Welcome to Oh Brawling Love!, in which guest critics write about things they thought they’d hate but ended up adoring. 

This week’s entry comes from Amanda Wilburn, author of the fantastic Southern culture blog AppyLove. She’s here to describe her tumultuous relationship with the beautiful, clog-dancing, alt-country singer-songwriter Elizabeth Cook (pictured above.) 

And let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard this one song Amanda describes, which is all about balls.

Take it away, Amanda!

Oh Brawling Love: Elizabeth Cook

By AMANDA WILBURN

I watched Elizabeth Cook perform as part of a wonderful live-broadcast radio variety show on New Year’s Eve, 2008. Right away it looked like the odds weren’t in her favor in terms of reeling me in as a fan. She’s tall, thin, blonde, and gorgeous, and she was wearing a short black size-two dress with cowboy boots. On top of that, I’ve slowly put down roots on the opposite side of the split-rail fence that is contemporary country.

Not that she cared what I thought, since there were about 900 other audience members drooling and sweating over her already.
The show’s host blathered on about Cook’s talent while I waited for the set to begin, so that it would end, so that I could get another drink from the bar at the commercial break.

Then something interesting happened. Elizabeth Cook started talking, and she seemed funny, and humble, and happy to be there. She is a female country singer whose most recent album includes nine songs written or co-written by her. As she pointed out during her set, that’s not the norm for female country singers, and she mentioned she was thankful for that.

I realized that not only is Elizabeth Cook good-looking, she’s also smart and hardworking. But that’s only the beginning of my conversion to Elizabeth Cook fandom. I’m not blown away by her voice, or even her remarkable beauty, but I am thoroughly impressed by her songwriting and her dedication to music and to her audience (which I’m prepared to tell you much more about.)

I also realized that I appreciate people who devote their time to doing something they love, and through that devotion become really, really good at it. And Cook is really, really good at writing and performing country songs.

As her set progressed, we learned that she was runner-up to Darrell Scott at the Americana Music Awards for her song “Balls.” The song’s lyrical hook is the line “Sometimes it takes balls to be a woman.” Now, normally hearing an expression like that makes me run the other direction screaming, or gives me nightmares in which I’m trapped in a room filled with kitschy wall-hangings that say things like “A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle” or “I am woman! I am invincible! I am pooped!”

But the song feels familiar, written as—and destined to become—an upbeat country standard. It’s not a feminist lament or a redneck holler of outrage, just a statement of fact. And when Elizabeth Cook sings it, it’s like hearing your best friend say just what you needed to hear about something that’s been bugging you for a while. Maybe after a year of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and ceaseless media pontification on race and gender, “Balls” was a welcome down-to-earth commentary about what womanhood means, delivered by a woman who can sing it with pathos.

So even though it was New Year’s Eve, and her set was totally impinging on my next trip to the bar, Elizabeth Cook hooked me like a summer morning bluegill within the space of three songs.

Then, something kind of amazing happened. She put down her guitar. She said, “Now Tim [Carroll]’s going to play a song for y’all that he wrote. It’s about the TGV.” For those of you who may not know this, the TGV is the high-speed train in France, and something I was pretty interested in and had many conversations about in my eighth-grade French class. Totally random topic for a country song, and utterly irresistible to me.

Then Elizabeth Cook said, “While he plays that, I’m going to do a little dance for you.” Suddenly, Mr.-Rogers-style, she was sitting down to change her shoes. So that she could clog to the TGV song. You know how they say there’s no zealot like a convert? Well, when I saw Elizabeth Cook flapping her clog-shoed feet to a song about a high-speed train in France, I saw the light. On the stage before us was a woman genetically designed to entertain.

There probably won’t be another musician in my life of whom I can think “She had me at TGV.” But as far as I can tell, I’m hanging on that fishing line, suckered in—along with Rolling Stone, CMT, Rodney Crowell, and the Americana Music Association—and headed for the live well on Elizabeth Cook’s pontoon boat. Come on in, the water’s fine.