Ben Cox revisits Jacksonville live album with expanded reissue

Downtown Jacksonville gave Ben Cox more than a stage in March 2006. At the now-closed Due Gatti Coffee Shop, a standing-room-only crowd watched him record Room Painted Blue live and unrehearsed, capturing a small-room blues moment that still defines part of the city’s music memory.

Cox is now returning to that project with a digitally remastered and expanded edition set to arrive June 1. The release adds five previously unreleased tracks drawn from three additional sessions recorded during the same era, extending an album that launched his solo performing career and preserved a local sound that has grown harder to find in the years since.

The Jacksonville connection is what gives the project its weight in Morgan County. Room Painted Blue was made in a downtown venue where listeners could hear every note without studio polish or overdubs. That kind of direct, room-first performance is part of the area’s blues legacy, and the new edition puts that history back in circulation for readers who remember the clubs, coffee shops and basement rooms that once anchored the scene.

The musicians on the record help tell that story, too. Stan Robinson, Jeff Newman, Stuart Smith and Matt Duncan were part of the Central Illinois network that supported Cox’s work and helped build the sound around Jacksonville. Their names matter because the album was not a one-off solo statement. It was a snapshot of a working community of players tied to the same local circuit.

Cox’s career also stretches well beyond this release. He hosted Saturday Night R&B Hour on WEAI in Jacksonville beginning in 2004, later continued regional radio work, wrote for Blues Blast Magazine, ran Juke Joint Soul and Elm City Radio, and contributed songwriting and liner notes to other projects. That resume makes Room Painted Blue less like a nostalgia piece and more like a return to a long-running document of the region’s blues culture.

For Morgan County, the reissue arrives as a reminder that Jacksonville’s influence has not disappeared just because some of its venues have. The rooms may be gone, but the recordings remain, and Cox’s expanded edition gives that local chapter another chance to be heard.