Ry Cooder

Los Angeles

Ryland Peter Cooder was born in Los Angeles on 15 March 1947 and raised in Santa Monica. He began playing guitar at three, and at four he lost his left eye in an accident with a knife and has worn a glass eye since. He briefly attended Reed College in Portland. At fourteen he saw Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove in West Hollywood, and three years later he was playing that stage himself. He became known for his slide guitar and for his habit of bringing traditional and neglected music to new listeners.

In the 1960s he played banjo in a short-lived pickup trio with Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, and later carried banjo tunings and the three-finger roll over to the guitar. He joined Taj Mahal in the Rising Sons, whose album the record company rejected and which appeared only in 1992. He played on Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk in 1967 and left the band at the Mt. Tamalpais Festival that June, when Don Van Vliet froze on stage. Sessions for the Rolling Stones followed, including slide guitar on Sister Morphine on Sticky Fingers.

Solo records and film scores

His debut, Ry Cooder, came out on Reprise in 1970, and his later Warner Bros. albums moved to the main Warner label when the Reprise imprint was retired. Into the Purple Valley (1972) was his breakthrough, an album of blues, gospel, calypso and country songs in unusual arrangements. Bop Till You Drop (1979), mostly rhythm and blues and rock and roll covers, was the first digitally recorded major-label pop album, and held his hit cover of Elvis Presley's Little Sister.

In the 1980s he turned to film, scoring The Long Riders, Streets of Fire, Paris, Texas (1984) and Johnny Handsome, with Crossroads following in 1986. He formed Little Village in 1991 and made A Meeting by the River with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt in 1993. The two met less than an hour before recording began and improvised much of it, and it won a Grammy for Best World Music Album.

Talking Timbuktu

The two recordings in the hypersongs web are not Cooder solo songs. They are Ali Farka Toure songs from Talking Timbuktu, an album credited to Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder. Toure, born in 1939 and a Songhai from the Timbuktu region of Mali, sang mostly in Songhay, Fulfulde, Tamasheq or Bambara. He disliked being called a bluesman and said his music was older than the blues.

The two met in London in the summer of 1992, where Toure gave Cooder a one-string lute he had played as a child, and they agreed to work together. Toure had retired from music in 1990 for his rice farm before his producer brought him back. The album was recorded at Ocean Way in Hollywood in September 1993. Nick Gold of the World Circuit label executive-produced, and Cooder produced and played electric and slide guitar. Jim Keltner played drums, John Patitucci bass and Clarence Gatemouth Brown electric guitar and viola. Two members of Toure's band, Oumar Toure and Hamma Sankare, sang and played percussion. Toure himself played guitar, banjo and the njarka.

Cooder told Jas Obrecht in 1994 that Toure was like the village headman, with a perfect inside groove. He also described Toure's semi-open tunings, close to open D, and his playing with thumb and first finger. The record includes Ai Du and Diaraby, the last two tracks. It won the Grammy for Best World Music Album and was the first major success for World Circuit.

Buena Vista and after

In 1996 Gold invited Cooder to Havana to record with African and Cuban musicians. The Malian players could not get visas, so the sessions produced three Cuban albums, among them Buena Vista Social Club, which Cooder produced in 1997. He was fined $25,000 for violating the US embargo on Cuba, and Wim Wenders's 1999 film about the project was nominated for an Oscar.

Later records include Chavez Ravine (2005), My Name Is Buddy (2007), I, Flathead (2008), Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (2011), Election Special (2012), The Prodigal Son (2018) and Get On Board with Taj Mahal (2022). The Taj Mahal album was made at his son Joachim's house, mostly in single takes. Rolling Stone ranked him eighth among guitarists in 2003, and the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards gave him a Lifetime Achievement award in 2017. Toure died in Bamako on 6 March 2006, aged 66.