Leroy Hog Cooper

LEROY "HOG" COOPER

Baritone sax specialist Leroy "Hog" Cooper crossed paths with both Fathead and Brother Ray long before he actually joined the ranks of the band. Cooper was another proud product of the fertile Dallas R&B circuit, who initially encountered Charles at the 1952 session with Zuzu Bollin (Ray was just a spectator that day).

"That's when I first met him," says Cooper. "I was in the Army during this time. Stanley Turrentine kept telling us about this fantastic piano player who was blind. He was talking about Ray."

A giant-sized presence (he's since slimmed down), Cooper acquired his nickname while attending school. "I was so big," he explains. "Some little guy in college told me, 'You big hoghead so-and-so,' you know. Boy, everybody thought that was hilarious. I was 'Pig' first, and then I went to 'Hog.' Too much spaghetti and wine!"

Cooper honed his horn chops during a stretch in the service. "I came out of an Army band," he says. "We were getting Basie's charts from Ernie Wilkins. I was stationed near St. Louis, so the guys would go by Ernie's house. If they would copy the score, we could have the charts. Sometimes we had charts before Basie!"

Hog and Fathead were frequent musical cohorts -- they both played on the 1954 Lowell Fulson date that produced "Reconsider Baby" -- so it isn't too surprising that Newman offered his friend entrée to Charles' band in 1957. "Fathead used to come by the club where I worked in Dallas all the time," he says. "He was playing baritone and wanted to go to the tenor. So he said, 'Why don't you come in and play the baritone?' I was on another gig, and the gig folded. So Ray Charles' manager called me the same day, and I thought somebody was pulling my leg. I said, 'I can't believe this.'"

Working with Ray was a far cry indeed from what Cooper had previously experienced on the bandstand. "I was working with these little local bands," he says. "Ray was more organized -- uniforms and so forth." The musicianship was sky-high as well. "I enjoyed the little band, because we were seven or eight of us trying to sound like 18," says Cooper. "We always tried to pull together. It's funny -- I learned later that that was very different, because so many guys in bands would be trying to outdo each other. But that wasn't any part of us. We wanted to sound good as a unit."

Cooper's first recording session with Charles in December of '59 coincided with Ray's switch to the ABC-Paramount label. The Sid Feller-supervised date produced the streetwise "Them That Got" as well as "My Baby! (I Love Her, Yes I Do)" and "Who You Gonna Love?" Thanks to Ray, Cooper came to understand much about his craft. "I learned to respect music more," Cooper says. "He's approaching music from a serious aspect. I learned to really appreciate and try to learn more on my art."

The big band format Charles favored during the 1960s and '70s suited Cooper like a hog in slop. He even landed the briefest of speaking roles in Ballad In Blue, a 1964 movie melodrama, which starred Ray and the band, that was filmed in Ireland by director Paul Henreid. Naturally, Cooper's only line revolved around his prodigious appetite.

Finally, in 1976, Cooper settled into a permanent band-leading gig at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where he remains to this day (whenever Ray's big band passes through the Sunshine State, though, Cooper rejoins him for selected concert dates). His loyalty remains as strong as when he was the full-time anchor of Charles' mighty reed section.

"We used to work about nine months out of the year, and we would take three months off," says Cooper. "And when that time would come, I would get a real sad feeling, because every night I could sit up there and listen to this man sing and what he would do. Just to think that I would have to be away from that for about three or four months, it would make me very sad."

Bill Dahl