Do we like Roger Cook?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long, decent songwriting career and a recent charity push for disability housing, with no harmful words or acts found, but not much public record to lean on.
Roger Cook is the Bristol-born bloke behind a pile of songs you already know. He started as a teenager in a local doo-wop group, then teamed up with his mate Roger Greenaway, and the pair wrote for the Fortunes and the Hollies. Their hits include “You've Got Your Troubles” and “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”.
The big one is the Coke jingle that became “I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)”, which other artists then recorded as a proper single. Cook moved to Nashville in 1975 and became a major figure in country songwriting and publishing. He co-wrote “I Just Want to Dance with You” with John Prine.
On the harm test, we searched for anything he has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines, climate or politics, and found nothing. No controversial posts, no culture-war grievance, and no repeat work with people who push that stuff. That's a clean result, but it comes partly from silence: he's a working songwriter, not a commentator, so there's not much to judge him on.
We also looked for lawsuits, convictions and allegations and found none. The legal results that came up were about other musicians, and The Cook Report belongs to a different Roger Cook, the journalist. Nothing new turned up on him lately either, so there's no fresh stoush to report.
The good stuff is the real kind. In March 2025 he led the third benefit concert for Our Place Nashville, which supports Friendship Houses, affordable and inclusive housing for adults with developmental disabilities. He also got the Country Music Hall of Fame's “Poets and Prophets” treatment in 2013.
He was the first British songwriter inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, in 1997, and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in 2009 alongside Greenaway. That's decades of quiet, consistent work, and a career built on songs about people getting along.