For the past 15 years, the singing Cox Family siblings and their relatives have gathered for holidays and birthdays in a health-care facility near Cotton Valley, La., where they all grew up.  There they sing and pray and reminisce at the bedside of 78-year old family patriarch and group founder Willard Cox, who was left a paraplegic and no longer able to perform with his children after an auto accident in 2000.  Inevitably, talk would turn to a Cox Family album produced by their longtime friend Alison Krauss and left unfinished, locked away and seemingly forgotten in a record-company vault since 1998.  The recordings included Willard’s robust lead vocals on songs like the Louvin Brothers’ “Cash on the Barrelhead” and Crystal Gayle’s lover’s lament, “I’ll Get Over You.”  “He isn’t able to sing like that anymore,” says son Sidney. “It was our ongoing phrase for years: `Boy I wish we could get that record back.’”  Now, thanks to Ms. Krauss and assists from two Nashville record executives, the Cox Family’s long-lost album, “Gone Like the Cotton” (Warner Nashville/Rounder/Asylum) will be released Friday.  The newly finished album finds the Cox Family—Evelyn, 56, Sidney, 50, and Suzanne, 48—harmonizing with their father on tracks they never expected to hear again.  The group was originally formed by Willard, who taught his children to pick and sing.  “I don’t remember my dad ‘teaching’ us harmony exactly,” says Sidney. “We just kind of picked a part: `You get the high part or the low part—get offa my part.’”  The bluegrass band built a wider following with its mix of country, gospel and pop styles. “Even working bluegrass shows,” Sidney recalls, “we’d do a Bill Monroe song, then turn around and do an Eagles song. So we like to mix it up a little. I wouldn’t want to bore someone by just yankin’ the same old doodle.”  Ms. Krauss first discovered the family at a Texas bluegrass festival in 1987 when she was 16. “Anybody who hears their music feels connected to them,” she says. “They take people to a place they wish they were from.”  In 1994 she collaborated with them on an album for her longtime label, Rounder Records: “I Know Who Holds Tomorrow,” won a Grammy. (Ms. Krauss has won 27 of them, tied with Quincy Jones as the most of any living person; only the late conductor Georg Solti has more.)  In 1996, the group was signed by Kyle Lehning, then head of Asylum, one of Nashville’s major labels. He enlisted Ms. Krauss to produce their 1996 Asylum debut “Just When We’re Thinking It’s Over.”  For the next album the following year, Ms. Krauss brought in members of her own Union Station band and Nashville stars including pianist Pig Robbins, guitarist Sonny Landreth and mandolin maestro Sam Bush. Playing live in the studio, the musicians laid down tracks for 11 songs.  Lead vocals by Evelyn and Willard were recorded for six of the tracks before the sessions were temporarily suspended in February 1998. The Cox Family intended to return shortly to record Suzanne and Sidney’s lead vocals and to add the family’s signature four-part harmonies.  But before they could, Mr. Lehning was let go by the label and the Cox Family was among those dropped from its roster. The unfinished tapes became the property of Asylum (and now, Warner Music Group).  Angry at the abrupt dismissals, and unwilling to allow the label to do with them as they pleased, Ms. Krauss removed or “wiped” the vocals from the unmixed tapes before returning them to Asylum. “I didn’t erase them. I would never erase any sound that came from the mouths of the Cox Family.” She hid the vocal tracks, she says.  The Cox Family contributed to another Grammy winner, the soundtrack to ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?,” and continued to perform until July 2000, when the accident that also injured their mother, Marie, seemed to end the group’s professional life. The siblings largely remained in Cotton Valley, where they sang and played a bit, raised their own families and cared for their parents. Marie recovered from her injuries but died of cancer in 2009. Throughout, says Sidney, “We never stopped thinking about the last thing we did together—that record.”  Mr. Lehning, the former Asylum chief, kept thinking of it, too. Last year, while vacationing in Nantucket, Mass., he had dinner with Warner Music Nashville CEO John Esposito and told him about the unfinished Cox Family album in his company’s vaults. Mr. Esposito pledged to launch a search for the tapes and meet with Ms. Krauss. “Just the chance to sit in the room with Alison Krauss was good enough for me,” he says.  When Mr. Lehning emailed Ms. Krauss with the news, Suzanne Cox was a guest in her Nashville home. “She’s upstairs in the bathroom,” recalls Ms. Krauss. “I go up and start banging on the door. ‘You’re not gonna believe this!’ ”  But elation quickly turned to worry. When Ms. Krauss learned that Mr. Esposito had found what he thought were the long-lost album tapes and that he especially loved the vocal harmonies, she knew it wasn’t the right recording. “I knew I had got rid of those doggone vocals,” she says. “And now I couldn’t find them.”  Before she did find them—among other tapes she kept in storage—Mr. Esposito told her to go ahead and finish the album. She thought, “Oh my gosh, he’s Santa,” Ms. Krauss says.  Last April, the Cox siblings returned to Nashville to complete the unfinished tracks and record a new one—“Gone With the Cotton,” the album’s title song.  Upon their return to Cotton Valley, they played the album for Willard.  “His eyes lit up,” Sidney said. “It’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time.”
The singing Cox Family was halfway through their last album when disaster struck. How Alison Krauss and two record executives saved it after 17 years.