"Mayor Cook on guitar against Texas's death penalty," is the title of Brandi Grissom's profile of John Cook in today's El Paso Times. Here's an excerpt from the beginning:
In a dark blue pin-striped suit, crisp white dress shirt, snug red tie and shiny brown dress shoes, El Paso Mayor John Cook sure didn't look like any folk singer.
But he slung one knee over the other, braced his guitar and belted out a couple songs Wednesday night in Austin just as he has in five other cities across the state, playing with a variety of musicians promoting abolition of the death penalty in Texas.
"I don't think we, the state, should have the right to take a person's life," Cook said in an interview before he took the outdoor stage at Scholz Garten in Austin.
The mayor has been on a mission this year with the Music for Life Tour. The tour, affiliated with the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, stopped in El Paso in April and organizers asked Cook if he'd join them for a concert at Club 101.
"I said, 'Sure, sounds like a blast,'" Cook said.
He had such a blast that, despite his political advisers' recommendations, he asked the organizers if he could join them on the rest of their stops.
Cook has taken his song stylings to concerts in Dallas, Arlington, Fort Worth and Waco, appearing with musicians such as Sara Hickman and The Austin Lounge Lizards. At Wednesday's show in Austin, humorist, author and former gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman joined the show.
"For me, it's a moral and religious conviction," Cook said of his opposition to the death penalty.
The chances, he said, are too great that an innocent person could be executed. And God, he said, gives humans the right to seek punishment, not vengeance.
Earlier coverage of Sara Hickman's year-long Music for Life tour is here.
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