History

Where did Colonel Cox come from?
› Colonel Cox was a Colonel for the south in the civil war that we have in commom if you trace back our ancestry. His Family came over from Ireland in the early 1800’s and settled down in what is now Charleston, SC. Though they preferred the politics of the north they loved the weather and charm of the south. They were a very musical family, not caring much to get too involved in the goings ons of that day. In 1861 Cornelius Noonan McCox was recruited to fight for the Confederacy. By some clerical mistake he was very quickly promoted to Colonel.

Colonel Cox was a horrible Colonel because of his desire to fight for the North, but he played a mean fiddle so the south kept him around. in 1866 he moved his family to the still new free state of Kansas. He ended up settling down in what is now known as Kansas City. He passed his talents on down the line and we are now carrying on his musical legacy.

Our beginning came in the mid 90’s when we were all loosely related in a band that played what can only be called progressive rock… We started out playing that early 90’s grunge style and progressed as that style did (with hard rock and acoustic ballads).  Then we moved to punk, then to 3rd wave ska but the closest we ever got to ska was when Paul Johnson brought his trumpet to a few rehearsals.  We eventually just started attaching the word core to every new style we tried until we eventually broke up in mid 1998.  Never to fear, it would only be a year or so later when we would form our most solid work to date, the Paul Johnson Fan Club.

By day we played at our church (mostly alt. pop/rock stuff) and by night we were what Christopher Guest is to documentaries.  We mimicked every style we could think to make fun of.  We had our Creed song, our U2 song, our Cure song, our 80’s new wave song and so much more.  We even did a dance remix to a popular praise and worship tune our church did.  Though we never really got into the style we played at church we learned how to play together through numerous events, conferences and worship services.  When we grew tired of it we started to try to get them to fire us. Unfortunately, we could do no wrong.  Rewriting a Scissor Sisters’ song and playing it at church didn’t do it, doing the Chorus to The Scorpions’ “Rock You like a Hurricane” for about 5 minutes to open a worship service didn’t do it and even playing the David Bowie/Bing Crosby remake of “little drummer boy” at Christmas couldn’t get us fired… We were luckily able to just kind of dissolve as a group of younger kids took over.

After the breaking up of PJFC a few side projects were started but never really took off.  There was Tarquin Gotch that came on strong with the single “Micah Likes Monkeys” and had a follow up hit with a song that was started with PJFC “Brother in Law to Kaps” but Tarquin Gotch didn’t gain much traction after that.  There was even the beginning of our own mockumentary that we were going to do about stupid church people.  We wrote a song and a half, recorded a demo of one and had the concept for the film but it never really materialized. There was also our mock-emo band that we only did a photoshoot for, Phrase the Coin.

By this time Ben had become completely fed up with almost every piece of music he was playing and hearing.  While discussing this with Aaron at a local guitar shop they decided to start a band with the only style they hadn’t touched much of yet… Country.

They dug out their Johnny Cash albums and got to work.