An actor with a decades-long resume, Ronny Cox is touring as a folk singer
Music and acting came together early in the movie career of Ronny Cox. His first film was 1972’s “Deliverance,” which featured Cox in a memorable scene playing “Dueling Banjos” with a young expressionless boy in rural Georgia. He also played Woody Guthrie’s folk-singing comrade Ozark Bule in 1976’s “Bound For Glory.”
In later decades, Cox has often been seen as buttoned-up authority figures in suit and tie in the likes of “RoboCop” and “Beverly Hills Cop,” but his career now is aimed mostly at making music, touring the country and entertaining only the occasional film or TV role. He’ll be performing songs and stories on Saturday afternoon, Aug. 6, at the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena, where he’ll be joined onstage by his musician son.
“My son, John, used to be the leader of my band, but he has a family now and has to have a real job,” says Cox, 78, with a laugh. “As you know, there are dozens of dollars to be made in folk music.”
You spend most of your year touring now.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a great career. The same time I was struggling as an actor I was struggling as a musician. I’ve actually been playing music since I was a kid. Where I grew up in New Mexico, in the early ‘60s, my little town of Portales, N.M., was only 19 miles south of Clovis, which was a hotbed of recording. I was around when Buddy Holly was cutting “Peggy Sue.” There were a lot of artists that came out of that studio.
I got my first film, “Deliverance,” because I could play. And my second big film was “Bound for Glory.” So early in my career, people knew me as this actor from New Mexico who also played music. It’s just in the last 25 or so years that I’ve had success playing men of authority with suits and ties on. When people see me with a guitar, it blows their mind a little bit.
Are those roles in the suits and ties far from your real life?
About as far as you can get. I don’t even own a suit.
Your early film roles were able to capitalize on your music skills. How did those two sides of yourself work together?
They’ve always gone hand in hand. Even when I didn’t play music publicly all that much, I played music at home. I was calling square dances when I was 10 years old. I put myself through college with a rock ‘n’ roll band. That I could play was instrumental — pun intended — in me getting the role in “Deliverance.” Music has always been a huge part of my life.
The show you’re performing at the Coffee Gallery Backstage is in a very intimate venue. Have you played there before?
Many times. [Owner] Bob Stane has been a hero for the acoustic community for years. It is a small venue, but it’s a small venue that everyone goes and plays because it’s such a great place to play — 49 seats!
There is a tradition of small rooms for this kind of music, like McCabe’s in Santa Monica. Is there a something about a small room and acoustic guitars that were made for each other?
Those are my favorite places to play. I don’t like playing big venues. I’ve been lucky in my career. I’m not rich, but I’ve got enough money, and I don’t want to play anything over 300 or 500 seats. The whole idea of my show is because I’m a storyteller, too, I want a sense of intimacy. I want my show to be like when we were kids sitting around the living room or on the porch and sharing music with our family and friends. I want to feel like it’s a shared experience. I’m not interested in being up there behind a wall of light.
Do you have a sense of who your audience is?
It’s sort of all over the place. Folk music audiences as a rule are older. ... I do half as many songs as anybody else would do because the stories are equally as important to me as the song. There’s a whole school of thought — get up there and sing the song and shut up. It just doesn’t work for me. I love the idea of setting up a song with a story. And if I don’t have a story for a song, I’ll make one up. I’m not bound by honesty. The title of my show a lot of the time is “Songs and Stories and Out and Out Lies.”
I read a quote from Picasso that I found completely freeing: “Art is truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” My audiences come to me and they love the stories.
Where do the stories come from?
Everywhere. This is practically all songs that I’ve written, so obviously the stories are perhaps true, and a lot of them are intimately entwined with my life, but some of them aren’t.
One of your early movies was “Bound for Glory,” about Woody Guthrie. Was that a special project for you?
Absolutely. I was a Woody Guthrie fan my whole life and working with [director] Hal Ashby — if you look at all those great films of the ‘70s, practically every great film was directed by Hal Ashby. I found him to be the most open, collaborative, generous director. He would take a suggestion from anybody. There was a joy going to work with Hal every day.
Are you pursuing acting as much as you have in the past?
No. By my own choice, I turn down about 85 or 90 percent of the things I’m offered these days. I thought people would just forget I was around, but it’s the opposite. One of the most powerful negotiating tools in this town is the ability to say no: “You can’t say no!” I’m doing some stuff. I’m involved in a video game now — with [motion-capture], very complicated. These days I will not allow any movie or any television show to interfere with a gig I already have booked.
When I pulled out of this one movie, finally they said, “Well, how much are they paying you for that damn folk music gig?” And I said, “I think I’ve got more money in my pocket!” I still love acting. I just don’t love it quite as much as the music.
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Steve Appleford, steve.appleford@latimes.com
Twitter: @SteveAppleford
