Ry Cooder, one musician, many faces

From the time he first picked up a guitar as a young child, Ry Cooder has never stopped expanding the scope of his music. The most accomplished and respected slide guitarist of his generation, Cooder’s work embraces a host of disparate musical styles, from country, blues, rock’n’roll, and early jazz to Hawaiian, Caribbean, Cuban, Tex-Mex, and gospel.

Ryland Peter Cooder was born in March, 1947, in Los Angeles, California. After he accidentally blinded himself in one eye at age four, a family friend gave him a tenor four-string guitar. He listened to Spanish classical guitarist Vincent Gomez and folksingers Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, while his father showed him a few basic chords. He was later briefly tutored in traditional guitar techniques.

By the time he was 15, Cooder was playing at a folk and blues club, and shortly after recorded with blues singer Jackie DeShannon. In 1965, when Cooder was only 17, he formed a group called the Rising Sons with singer Taj Mahal and drummer Ed Cassidy. The group split up when the release of a completed album was cancelled (it eventually appeared in 1992). In the late 1960s, Cooder’s friendship with the producer Jack Nitzsche led to session work, and he appeared on albums by Captain Beefheart, Phil Ochs, Randy Newman, and the Rolling Stones, joining them for Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. His association with the Stones ended after clashes with Keith Richard over the authorship of the main riff for “Honky Tonk Woman," which Cooder claimed was his own creation.

In the 1970s, Cooder cut down on session work to concentrate on his own material. His self-titled 1970 solo album included reworkings of obscure blues, hillbilly, and rhythm and blues (R&B) songs. Since then, Cooder has increasingly tried to bring non-rock influences into his work, and many of his albums feature collaborations with world musicians, such as Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence, Tex-Mex accordionist Flaco Jimenez, and Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui. 

In 1992, he briefly formed Little Village with Nick Lowe and John Hiatt. Cooder continued to make new musical acquaintances, recording A Meeting by the River with Indian classical musician V. M. Bhatt in 1993, and then Talking Timbuktu with Malian blues guitarist/singer Ali Farka Touré. Talking Timbuktu was No. 1 on the world music charts for 25 weeks and earned the pair the 1994 Best World Music Grammy.

Rolling Stone magazine once described Cooder as the best bottleneck guitarist around. This refers to the technique of sliding a bottleneck (or metal sleeve) over a finger and rubbing it along the guitar strings. Cooder took slide guitar to new heights in the mid-1980s with his own album Get Rhythm (1987).

In developing his style, Cooder studied with such blues legends as Jesse Fuller, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, and Skip James, and added skills and techniques picked up from other sources, such as the open tuning he learned from Joseph Spence. Cooder has never been afraid to experiment, as evidenced by the Siberian Tuvan throat singers and the Navajo flautist he used when recording the soundtrack for the film Geronimo (1994).

Cooder’s soundtrack debut was on Candy (1968), followed by Performance (1970), starring Mick Jagger. His slide was prominent on Blue Collar (1978), and he has scored around a dozen films since, many of them for director Walter Hill, including Streets of Fire (1984), Crossroads (1986), Johnny Handsome (1989), and Last Man Standing (1996). Cooder showed his true blues interest with his slide work on Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas (1984), which paid haunting homage to bluesman, Blind Willie Johnson.