- Submarine Songs
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Tommy Cox is probably the best known singer-songwriter-submariner, if for no other reason than that nobody knows of another one. Each of his songs came out of his career as a cryptological technician, doing spy work in the 1960s and '70s, spending as much as nine months a year at sea, sometimes on several submarines.
Torpedo in the Water, for instance, hails from a trip he made on the Lapon, when they were in front of a Soviet submarine, which fired a test shot that acquired their boat what you would call a high-stress situation in the business.
Ballad of Whitey Mack refers to the skipper who signed his qualification card, the legendary Capt. Chester M. "Whitey Mack", who holds the record for covertly trailing a Soviet submarine.
His first job was at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 1962 just in time for the Cuban missile crisis. In December 1963, he transferred to the USS Oxford, an intelligence-gathering ship, and made a trip around South America and the Caribbean, singing at gigs in Chile, Nicaragua, the Dutch West Indies, and Peru.
His wife, Sandra, quickly learned that he would be gone for months at a time. He couldn't tell her where he was going, or talk about what he had done when he returned. She raised their three children, often on her own.
He started writing submarine music in 1968, when the Navy suffered its second submarine loss in five years. Scorpion was originally written as a prayer when that boat was lost May 22, 1968. He put it to music later and it made it onto his Take Her Deep compact disk.
It was about that time I got the idea for an album of theme music, Cox said. Nobody else had ever done it. By 1978, he had cut Take Her Deep, with 13 songs he wrote and sang. He got out of the Navy in 1979, went to work for Analysis &Technology for a few years, then moved back to Maine.
The submarine CD business has never been particularly lucrative, though he's covered his costs with 7,000 copies of Take Her Deep and 1,100 of his 2001 album with Bobby Reed, Brothers of the Dolphin. But it's been a heck of a ride, he said, first in the boats, and since then with the veterans who want to hear him sing about the boats.
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- 1976 aboard USS Seawolf
- 2003 at Sub Vets Groton