TV star, congressman, recovering alcoholic: Ben ‘Cooter’ Jones writes book on his fascinating life.

Date published: 6/21/2008

THE FREE LANCE–STAR

SPERRYVILLE—His portrayal of Cooter on “The Dukes of Hazzard” has made him an American icon—the personification of the redneck good ol’ boy.

It was a role that came naturally to Ben Jones, the son of a Portsmouth railroad worker, who grew up in a freight yard, who had worked in a garage—and was a hard-drinking, quick-to-anger, barroom brawler arrested 20 times for alcohol-related offenses before he “hit bottom at the backdoor of hell” and turned his life around.

In 1978, when he went to read for the part of Cooter, “the good ol’ boy mechanic with a wild streak” in “The Dukes of Hazzard,” he was “dressed as I usually dressed, in jeans and a work shirt, an old pair of boots and a feed store ball cap.

“The producers didn’t know the half of it,” he writes in his new book, “Redneck Boy in the Promised Land: The Confessions of ‘Crazy Cooter.’”

“I had spent my whole life being this character.”

So Jones, who later went on to serve two terms as a Democratic congressman from Georgia and has endorsed Barack Obama for president, has a little bit of credibility when he says that political pundits have got it all wrong when they speculate that Cooter types won’t vote for a black man for president.

“People want to say this campaign’s about race,” he told The Free Lance–Star during an interview at the Rappahannock County cabin he shares with wife Alma Viator.

“It’s not.”

The home, consisting of a barn and a cabin built in the 1740s and 1770s, then put together in 1980, sits on 50 acres at the edge of the Shenandoah Park on the headwaters of the Rappahannock River. It can be seen from Skyline Drive on the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s filled with Jones’ books, including the works of Shakespeare and Mark Twain, and he spends much of his time there reading, listening to music and fending off the occasional bear that climbs up on his porch looking for a snack.

Date published: 6/21/2008