Ronny Cox likes to play with the lights on.
Singer-songwriter, actor and author says when he performs he asks the venue not to dim the lights in the
audience. Instead of having a spotlight shining on him, staring into darkness, he prefers to see
listeners’ faces.
"The closer I am to the audience the more it feels like a shared experience," he said in a
telephone interview. "I want my shows to feel like it used to sitting around the front porch or the
kitchen table sharing music with family and friends."
Cox will perform at Grounds for Thought, 174 S. Main St., Bowling Green, Jan. 17 at 8 p.m.
It’s part of a weekend swing for a performer who has found celebrity on the screen but his passion is
sparked by sharing the songs he loves in intimate venues.
"I’ll play shows like this at a drop of a hat," he said. "I’ve been lucky, I had a great
career but I love doing this."
His career on the big screen started when he appeared as the guitarist in the dueling banjos scene in
"Deliverance" more than 40 years ago.
He went on to appear in a number of films, most often as villains as in "Total Recall" and
"Robocop" and on TV in "Stargate." He played Captain Jellico in a couple "Star
Trek" episodes.
He still takes acting jobs if the project interests him, and the money is right, and it doesn’t interfere
with his music schedule.
Cox said he was even cast in a major project recently, had been fitted out for his costume. Then the
production team called back and said filming had been delayed.
Cox checked his schedule and found out the new shooting schedule conflicted with his appearance at the
Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. Get someone else, he told the movie people.
They came back wondering: "How much are they paying you for that damn folk music gig?"
Cox responded: "I think I have more money in my pocket than they’re paying me."
But that’s beside the point.
"The thing that gives me the most pleasure is music," he said. "I made a life decision
that I won’t let any movie or TV show interfere with any music gig I have booked."
The enjoyment all comes from sharing, including sharing the stage with fellow musicians. He travels with
Radoslav Lorkovic, who plays keyboards and accordion, and Bruce Bowers, on fiddle and mandolin. Both add
vocal harmonies as needed. "We get a pretty good mixture of sounds," Cox said. The accordion
especially adds the needed Latin shading to the Southwest pieces penned by Cox, who grew up in New
Mexico.
He said he could play solo, but that "has zero enjoyment for me."
"Music is like a dialogue, it’s a conversation with other musicians," he said.
Cox has written enough songs to fill out an evening’s program, but here again that’s not the point.
He loves sharing songs that have moved him. It could be a jazz tunes from the 1920s, a piece of vintage
Western swing, or an Irish folk tune, or often a gem from another contemporary songwriter.
"That’s the job of folk artists to pass songs onto people," he said.
He bridges those songs with stories, some factual, some exaggerated, some fictionalized. He doesn’t
hesitate, he said, "to improve upon a story."
Quoting Picasso, he said: "Art is not truth; art is a lie that makes us realize truth."
Live concerts are "one way where we still share basic kinds of emotions," he said. "Folk
music is music intended to share. …. There’s a bonding that I don’t know that you get anywhere else.

"Music is like throwing darts. It’s a direct line to the heart," he said. "I want the
lights to stay up so I can see what effect this shared moment is having."