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The Dukes Of Hazzard – Episode Review:
“Cooter’s Girl” S06E12
This week’s Kibbe and Friends Show is a little different, and unfortunately it’s one we knew we needed to do. Actor Ben Jones, who portrayed Cooter Davenport on The Dukes of Hazzard, passed away at the age of 84. There have been other members of the Dukes family we’ve lost through the years, but Ben’s passing really made us stop and think about just how much he did to keep this show alive long after its original run ended. Between Cooter’s Place, the festivals, reunions, appearances, and bringing so many members of the cast back together with the fans, I’d make the argument that nobody did more to keep The Dukes of Hazzard alive in the hearts of its fans than Ben Jones.
Ben also had a fascinating life beyond Cooter. He was a working actor before the Dukes, including a very brief appearance in Smokey and the Bandit, and later served two terms in the United States House of Representatives. Eventually, though, he came back to the character that made him famous and built Cooter’s Place into something much bigger than just a store. Those locations and the events surrounding them became gathering places for Dukes fans, and they helped introduce the series to entirely new generations when the show returned to television through reruns.
I was also fortunate enough to interview Ben back in 2019 for K&F Show #97 around the 40th anniversary of The Dukes of Hazzard. That was an interesting interview from the first second because there really wasn’t an introduction. I said hello, Ben started talking, and I realized very quickly that I had better start recording. Thankfully I did. We’ll be rebroadcasting that conversation as a special bonus episode because Ben answered a lot of the questions we would want to ask him today, and he was also one of the very few guests—and the only Dukes cast member we interviewed—who had actually listened to our show before coming on. He knew what we did, had feedback about it, and was simply a very nice man to interview.
For this week’s regular Dukes review, we wanted to pick something specifically in honor of Ben and the character of Cooter. We settled on Season 6, Episode 12, “Cooter’s Girl,” because this is an episode that actually gives Cooter something substantial to do. We originally reviewed it way back on K&F Show #194, which somehow was five years ago. I rewatched it fresh for this show, and in honor of Ben I gave this one the full 10 Crazy Cooters Coming At You.
The big revelation of “Cooter’s Girl” is something we had never heard before: Cooter has a daughter. Her name is Nancy Lou, she has just turned 18, and she comes to Hazzard looking for the father she has never known. When Bo and Luke bring her to Cooter and she tells him, “You’re my father,” Ben gives a genuinely good performance. You can see Cooter immediately trying to put two and two together. He knows exactly who she is, but he also realizes that something has changed because Nancy Lou was never supposed to know about him.
Cooter eventually explains that when he was young, he and Beverly Hibbs ran off and got married over the course of a weekend. Her parents had the marriage annulled and took Beverly away to Alabama, where Cooter later learned she had given birth to their daughter. By then Beverly had remarried, and Cooter decided that Nancy Lou was probably better off not knowing about him because he didn’t want to put her in the middle of everything. The funniest part is how much effort Season 6 goes through to make absolutely certain we understand that, yes, Cooter and Beverly WERE MARRIED. Family values reign in Hazzard County by this point!
The problem for Cooter is that Nancy Lou apparently heard plenty about what her father was like when he was younger—and then the first time she really gets to see him, he’s involved in a barroom brawl. That’s actually one of the things that makes this episode work surprisingly well as a Cooter story. If you go all the way back to Season 1, Cooter really was a different character. That early “Crazy Cooter” was a wild, rambunctious guy who would ride a motorcycle into the Boar’s Nest, steal Jimmy Carter’s limousine because he liked it, drink moonshine in the morning, and generally do things that the later version of Cooter would probably have to repair afterward.
By Season 6, Cooter has evolved into one of the most dependable people in Hazzard. He’s still Cooter, but he’s also the guy who can fix absolutely anything and is essentially the caretaker of the General Lee. He can do engines, electrical work, paint, bodywork, build race cars, and apparently solve whatever mechanical disaster the Duke boys create that week. So Nancy Lou arriving with an image of the wild younger Cooter actually gives us a chance to see how much this character changed during the series.
Naturally, we also have a completely unrelated Dukes B-plot because apparently discovering that Cooter has an 18-year-old daughter wasn’t enough story for one hour of television. Bo Duke is now a glider pilot. When did that happen? Luke apparently trained him. When did THAT happen? We don’t know, but the General Lee is used to tow the glider into the air even though, as I pointed out, gliders are typically towed to altitude by an actual airplane. We’re not going to get lost in any of that because Cooter is the focus here, but it’s definitely one of those wonderfully ridiculous Dukes plot devices that you just have to accept and keep moving.
The glider does at least give Bo and Luke a great aerial view of Hazzard, and from the air they witness Nancy Lou being run off the road. That eventually ties us into the other plot involving two guys who have supposedly come to Hazzard to buy a sheep ranch. Of course, they aren’t actually interested in sheep. They want the property so they can dump toxic waste on it, because apparently dumping toxic waste was about the most evil thing a television bad guy could do in the 1980s.
Those same guys keep crossing paths with Cooter, which means Cooter keeps getting into trouble right in front of the daughter he is trying to convince that he isn’t the wild man her mother described. One of my favorite exchanges happens when the guys show up at Cooter’s garage after it’s closed and decide that because it is a gas station, they’re entitled to pump gas anyway. Cooter tells them he doesn’t want any more trouble, and the whole interaction annoyed me far more than it probably should have. Corndog and I then got distracted discussing whether Cooter could simply shut off or lock those old gas pumps, which naturally led us into identifying what we believe are vintage Gilbarco pumps. This is the kind of important investigative journalism you’ve come to expect from the Kibbe and Friends Show.
Then we finally get to the moment that makes this episode worthwhile from the automotive side. Cooter gets behind the wheel of the General Lee and has to jump his way into the action. The General flies over a fence with two guys underneath it shooting at the car, and it is a SWEET stunt. Corndog pointed out that even though the car clears the guys easily, having actual people positioned that close to the path of a jumping Charger makes it a pretty serious stunt from a risk and liability standpoint.
After Cooter lands and pulls up in the General, the Dukes ask him if he had any trouble. Cooter gives the perfect answer: “Piece of cake.” Then he pats the General Lee on the door. That’s Cooter. Bo and Luke eventually stop the toxic waste from being dumped, the bad guys are defeated, and most importantly Nancy Lou gets to see her father as the hero instead of the rambunctious kid she had heard stories about.
And then the ending hit differently this time.
That’s why this ended up being such a good episode to choose for this show. Ben gets to do some real acting, Cooter gets to be more than the guy fixing the General Lee, and by the end he gets to be the hero. Nancy Lou loves him, the Dukes love him, Hazzard loves him, and the audience loved him all along. The show then does what television always does and apparently forgets Nancy Lou ever existed, because after introducing Cooter’s daughter and giving them a happy ending, we never hear from her again. Welcome to episodic television in the 1980s!
More than anything, this episode gave us a way to say goodbye to someone who meant a lot to the Dukes of Hazzard community. Ben Jones didn’t simply play Cooter and move on. He embraced the character, embraced the fans, helped reunite the cast, and spent decades keeping this little fictional place called Hazzard County alive. Our upcoming rebroadcast of my 2019 interview with Ben will give everyone another chance to hear the stories directly from him, in his own voice.
Rest in peace, Ben Jones. And borrowing the words from the episode we reviewed this week:
Cooter, all the grateful people of Hazzard… thank you.
Episode Stats
K&F Show: #374
Dukes of Hazzard Season: 6
Episode: 12
Title: “Cooter’s Girl”
Original Air Date: December 30, 1983
Written By: Cy Rose
Directed By: Don McDougall
Original K&F Review: Episode #194
Cooter Davenport: Ben Jones
Nancy Lou: Kim Richards
K&F Rating: 10 Crazy Cooters Coming At You
Corndog’s Car/Stunt Rating: Approximately 8/10
Special Theme: A tribute to the life of Ben Jones and the legacy of Cooter Davenport
KF Crew: Bernie, Rob, and Corndog.
