Mutt Cooper

Mutt Cooper is a Navy veteran and songwriter who helps other veterans turn what happened to them into a song.

SALTYmf set up at the Fernandina Beach Songwriter Festival to record with the songwriters there, and Mutt was the first one to sit down. He led with the accent, said he probably needed subtitles, and noted there is no photograph of him that does not have a motorcycle or a guitar in it. He came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast talking about southern storytelling and about the veterans he writes with.

He writes with Freedom Sings, founded by Don Goodman and Steve Dean, where a songwriter is paired with a veteran to get that veteran's story down. You meet them the night before, sit down after breakfast at 8:30, then go somewhere private and start taking notes. Mutt starts fitting a melody as he writes, because he does lyrics first and the tune second. By one in the afternoon there is a song. By four they are playing it for a room. He is an occupational therapist by trade, working traumatic brain injury and orthopedics at Martin Army Hospital at Fort Benning, and he says he sometimes takes the songwriter hat off mid song and puts the OT hat back on.

His father kept a set of Hank Williams 78s at his grandmother's house and would not let him touch them. His grandmother would, so he learned to pull one out, play a side, flip it, play the other and put it back exactly, and his father never worked out how the boy knew all the words when a Hank song came on the radio. He carries two guitars, one kept in open G and one in standard tuning, because the open G one knows songs the other does not. He rides with the Miracle Riders, who have raised about three million dollars for children around Columbus, Georgia since 2009. He wrote their theme song.