I love New Orleans… it’s one of the great cities of the world, in my opinion.  The food is good, the music is great and there is  an energy and excitement there that is palpable.  It’s the only city I know of where the cab drivers know who is cooking where, and the coolest places to have a drink, or listen to music or to just hang out.  By the way, low fat cooking there is when they only use one stick of butter.  I have the Jones for Mr. B’s barbeque shrimp constantly.

In the early 90′s, I was there shooting a pilot for a TV show… we got to spend over 4 weeks there… to tell you the truth, Mary and I weren’t really too anxious to get home.

It was kind of an exciting time for me.. the pilot was my first foray back into the world of acting after taking an almost  2 year sabbatical.  I guess, I should explain that… I had done a TV series called CopRock that I really loved and I realized how much I missed the music in my life.  My son, John, had just left home for college and I didn’t have anyone to play music with… so, I turned down all acting work for almost two years, and since I didn’t know where the folk music community was, I went to Nashville and managed to get a record deal.  Harold Shedd signed me to the Mercury Nashville label… ha ha, I should point out that he signed 4  of us new artists at the same time… Shania Twain, Toby Keith… Billy Ray Cyrus and me.  As you know, they all went on to Country Music stardom and I went back to acting… and eventually found my brothers and sisters at the Kerrville Folk Festival.

Anyway, while I was in New Orleans, my Murcury Nashville record had just been released and I was soooo proud and full of myself… I had a cassette of my album and people could actually listen to it on the radio.  Not that people were, mind you, but they COULD.  A fellow cast member in the TV show we were doing was originally from New Orleans and his parents still lived there, and they loaned him their car for him to drive around while he was in town.  We used to go out and sit in his car and put my tape in the player and I could pretend that we, along with gazillions of others, were listening on the radio.  Pretty heady stuff!!

Well, one night he parked it in, I suppose, not the best section of The Quarter and when we came out the next morning the thieves had broken the windows of his car and had ransacked it and had taken everything.  Well… not everything… they had left my cassette.  Even the damn thieves are critics!!  I can just see them now… taking my cassette out of the tape deck… looking at it….”Hmmm, Ronny Cox…. I don’t think so!!”

Anyway, I got a song out of the whole deal.  I wrote this song with two of my favorite guys…. Tony Haselden and Jimmy Stewart…