RIP Little Joe Cook

posted in: Music News

Little Joe Cook, who had a big hit in 1957 with “Peanuts” with his doo-wop group Little Joe Cook & the Thrillers, died this week. He was 91.

A true music lifer with a distinctive falsetto, Cook played regularly at The Cantab, a little club in Cambridge, MA, until he physically couldn’t do it anymore. Some of these performances were legendary, with Cook working the crowd with the force of his personality and a stellar repertoire of classics and lost classics – including, of course, “Peanuts.”

He told the Boston Globe in 2012, “People don’t get it. Sure, I would have liked more hits. But sometimes the thing you give isn’t about the number of hits, but your influence. I have been influential, a lot more than a lot of other singers.”