Ben Jones, who portrayed the scruffy mechanic Cooter Davenport on all seven seasons of the CBS action series The Dukes of Hazzard before serving two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, died Sunday. He was 84.
Jones died from a “massive heart attack” at home while preparing to watch a baseball game on TV, his wife, Alma Viator, announced on Facebook.
Jones had played a federal agent in Moonrunners (1975), a rollicking film from United Artists about bootleggers that was written and directed by Gy Waldron, starred James Mitchum and featured narration from country singer Waylon Jennings.
When Waldron reconceived the movie for The Dukes of Hazzard, Jones (and Jennings) came along to join Tom Wopat, John Schneider, Catherine Bach, Sorrell Booke, Sonny Shroyer and a 1969 Dodge Charger nicknamed the General Lee on the Warner Bros. Television series.
The family-friendly comedy “plopped down in the very county where I was living, about 40 or 50 miles outside of Atlanta,” Jones recalled in a 2021 interview.
With his character the owner of Cooter’s Garage, located in Hazzard County Square right across from the sheriff’s office, Jones appeared on 141 episodes of the Georgia-set Dukes of Hazzard, which ran for seven seasons, from January 1979 to February 1985.
Davenport’s CB handle was “Crazy Cooter,” and he often started his conversations with “Breaker one, breaker one, I might be crazy, but I ain’t dumb.”
Bolstered by the show’s popularity — it was No. 2 in the Nielsen ratings in 1979-80, trailing only Dallas, which followed it on Friday nights on CBS — Jones, a Democrat, ran for Congress in 1986 and lost a tight race to incumbent Pat Swindall for the seat in Georgia’s 4th congressional district.
Two years later, however, he won in a landslide after Swindall had been accused of lying to a federal grand jury about his dealings with a federal undercover agent posing as a money launderer.
During the nasty campaign, Jones admitted he had “more skeletons in my closet than the Smithsonian,” including a problem with alcohol, but noted he hadn’t had a drink since September 1977. He was re-elected to another two-year term in 1990.
“People ask me in Washington if I’m doing any acting any more. More than ever,” he said with a laugh in a 1989 interview. “The skills I learned on stage and in film are invaluable in politics, because we’re talking about communication and being comfortable around a camera, being in front of an audience, finding that bond, that chemistry. And being energized by it.”
After redistricting took his seat, Jones was firmly defeated by Newt Gingrich in 1994, but an ethics complaint he filed against his opponent contributed to Gingrich’s resignation as House Speaker in 1998.
While living in Virginia in 2002, Jones tried again for Congress but lost to Eric Cantor, future House majority leader. Twelve years later, pundits said a letter Jones wrote to voters blasting his former opponent fueled Cantor’s shocking loss in the primaries.
In an example of art imitating life, it was revealed in the 1997 telefilm The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! that Cooter had become a congressman.
From left: Rick Hurst, John Schneider, Catherine Bach, Ben Jones and Tom Wopat from ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.’
Courtesy Everett Collection
The third of four sons, Ben Lewis Jones was born on Aug. 30, 1941, in Tarboro, North Carolina, and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, where his father, Buck, worked for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. His mother, Ila, the youngest of 13 kids, was a homemaker.
The family lived in a railroad section house near the docks that went without electricity or indoor plumbing for years.
At 16, Jones began “drinking and drifting,” he told The Washington Post. Still, he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Portsmouth in 1959 before attending East Carolina College for a year and then the University of North Carolina, where he majored in radio, television and motion pictures.
“I would volunteer for every student project, every off-the-wall experimental play and anything else around at which I could throw my inexperience and zeal,” he wrote in his 2008 memoirs, Redneck Boy in the Promised Land. “I had found something I thought I was good at. Something besides drinking.”
He acted in theater, took a semester at UNC here and there and showed up in the North Carolina-set film Killers Three (1968), starring Robert Walker Jr., Diane Varsi and Dick Clark. He left Chapel Hill for Atlanta in 1969.
Jones also appeared in Together for Days (1972), The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) and They Went That-a-Way & That-a-Way (1978) before landing on The Dukes of Hazzard.
During the show’s second season, Jones went missing for a few episodes amid a dispute over whether Cooter should be clean-shaven or have a full beard. The producers, who did not want the beard, eventually got their way.
In 1998, Jones meddled in politics again when he played media adviser Arlen Sporken for Mike Nichols in Primary Colors (1998), starring John Travolta as an Arkansas governor who becomes U.S. president.
In the 2005 Dukes of Hazzard movie, Cooter was played by David Koechner.
As someone who did a lot of repair jobs on the General Lee, Jones got a lot of mileage from The Dukes of Hazzard. He fronted Cooter’s Garage Band, which played concerts, fairs and festivals; owned Cooter’s theme stores/Hazzard museums in Tennessee and Virginia; and founded annual gatherings called Dukesfest and Hazzard Homecoming.
In addition to his fourth wife, whom he married in 1992, survivors include his children, Rachel and Walker.
