The Ry Cooder Story

We are proud to present our brand new Cooder book! "I Sing You a True Song: The Ry Cooder Story" is now available! Listen to this short trailer to learn more, including an excerpt from the preface. I Sing You a True Song on Amazon Written, produced and edited by Frank Schnelle Theme and background music by Chris Haugen Voices produced with text-to-speech AI Follow us on Facebook , Instagram , Tik...

In our final episode for now, we discuss Cooder's brief U.S. tour with Rosanne Cash, titled "The Music of Johnny Cash," as well as his latest collaboration with Taj Mahal, Get On Board. On this album, they pay tribute to two of their early musical heroes, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. We're still hoping for a sequel, but this could be a fitting conclusion to their long careers. This podcast freq...

In 2015, Cooder went on tour with bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White of the renowned country band The Whites. The tour featured a lot of gospel music and directly inspired Cooder's presumably final solo album, The Prodigal Son. It's a great and fitting farewell, and there is much to say about it, as well as the subsequent North American and European tours. This podcast frequently uses...

Hard as it is to believe, 2013's Live At The Great American Music Hall was only Cooder's second official full-length live album. As with 1977's Show Time, he had no intention of putting the emphasis on a new album, but instead performed a great mix of his live classics. His band consisted almost entirely of old friends like Flaco Jiménez and Terry Evans, and family members like son Joachim, Juliet...

A year after the deeply political Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down, Cooder went one step further and made Election Special, his contribution to the 2012 presidential election in the United States. Clearly on Obama's side and genuinely angry about the corporate takeover of society, he made an album in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill and Pete Seeger: a collection of folk and rock songs for th...

In response to the Bush presidency, Cooder produced what could be described as the modern-day equivalent of the kind of dustbowl ballads Woody Guthrie once sang. On Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down, he took aim at politicians, corporate greed and military action – all issues close to Guthrie's heart in the 1930s and '40s.– In this episode we also talk about Cooder's first and only book, and a few ot...

On I, Flathead, the final part of his California trilogy, Cooder turns his attention to the blue-collar types of the fifties and their music. It is about the kind of workers who toiled in the old Santa Monica airplane factory a few blocks from his childhood home, and the country, honky-tonk, and western swing he listened to so intently on the radio as a boy. This podcast frequently uses small snip...

2007 brought us not only Cooder's solo effort My Name Is Buddy, but also some very interesting contributions. He composed film music for Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights. And with Mavis Staples, he made an album that's right up there with his best productions. We’ll Never Turn Back is not one hundred percent Cooder, but it's certainly ninety-nine and a half. We also take a look at some more sess...

Two years after Chávez Ravine, My Name Is Buddy was a return to folk and dustbowl blues. In other words, to the kind of music Cooder had begun his career with. It is a song cycle set in the 1930s, but with clear references to the present – another California opus that would become the middle part of a full-fledged trilogy. Needless to say, it was another masterpiece. This podcast frequently uses s...

"Chávez Ravine" can mean many things. Obviously, there is an area in Los Angeles by that name. But there is also a book, a short documentary, and a Ry Cooder album, in that order. Cooder's 12th solo effort wouldn't exist without the book or the documentary. Like the Buena Vista Social Club, it came about almost by accident. And again, it was an opportunity he knew how to seize. It became his own o...

At the beginning of the new millennium, Cooder was once again deeply involved in world music. He released two back-to-back collaborative albums, this time with Indian flutist Ronu Majumdar and Cuban guitar wizard Manuel Galbán. As with his collaborations with V.M. Bhatt and Ali Farka Touré ten years earlier, he mostly took a back seat and helped them do their own thing. We also talk briefly about...

Cooder said goodbye to Hollywood in 1998 with his score for Primary Colors. Based on Joe Klein's originally anonymous book, the film tells the story of Bill Clinton's rise to the White House. Cooder's musical contribution is brief and eclectic, a mix of reinvented American classics, some ingenious recycling, and a few original compositions. This podcast frequently uses small snippets of musical re...

Shot after Cooder recorded the Buena Vista Social Club album in Havana, but before the production of the accompanying documentary, The End Of Violence has a great score that gives the film a real grandeur. The main theme is excellent as always, and there are some very interesting forays into the realm of electronic music. This podcast frequently uses small snippets of musical recordings in podcast...

The Buena Vista Social Club was by far Cooder's biggest commercial success. At the time, he probably thought it was business as usual – working with a bunch of interesting and skilled musicians from a different musical culture, as he'd done so many times before. But this time he hit the jackpot. The importance of the album and the subsequent documentary cannot be overstated. It is the most popular...

Last Man Standing, Cooder's last collaboration with Walter Hill, was a remake of a Japanese classic, 1961's Yojimbo. Hill and Cooder let loose once again, creating a dark, nihilistic action film starring Bruce Willis as the man with no name. Though very unconventional and focused almost exclusively on atmosphere, Cooder's score is surprisingly diverse and varied. - In this episode we also talk abo...

For Cooder, the mid-nineties were a period of astonishingly numerous world music collaborations. Between 1993 and 1995 alone, he worked with Indian string legend V.M. Bhatt (A Meeting By The River), Ali Farka Touré of Mali (Talking Timbuktu), Nenes and Shoukichi Kina of Okinawa (The Great Music Experience), The Chieftains of Ireland (The Long Black Veil), and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan (Dea...

Geronimo – An American Legend, released in 1993, was Cooder's eighth score for director Walter Hill. The movie is about the last resistance of the Native Americans against the superiority of white civilization. It's very serious and pretty dark. After the jazzy Trespass, this was something completely new for Cooder. For the first time, he composed something like a classical film score, a real tape...

Walter Hill's gritty 1992 action film Trespass flew under the radar at the time, but Cooder again broke new ground with his score. The music is unlike anything he had done before, and it heralds a phase closely associated with a new collaborator: jazz trumpeter Jon Hassell. In this episode we also look at Cooder's session work from the late eighties and early nineties. Having long since outgrown h...

In this episode we tell the story of Little Village, a band that existed for a short time in 1991-92. It consisted of Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, Jim Keltner and Nick Lowe, who had played together on Hiatt's album Bring The Family a few years earlier. Together they made another great album, but one that sounded different for a number of reasons. It wasn't a real hit, but it wasn't a disappointment eith...

We're back for our third season! Episode 25 focuses on 1989's Johnny Handsome, another underrated but truly spectacular Walter Hill film. Cooder's score is one of his best, if not THE best. It's surprising, moving, and has a great interplay between slide guitar, keyboards, and horn section. We also take a look at several other productions, including Pecos Bill, Tales From The Crypt, The Ghost Of F...

There is good news. Season 3 is in the works, and now we have a start date. In exactly one month, on September 26, episode 25 will be on the schedule. It will mainly be dedicated to Johnny Handsome, a really great Walter Hill movie. Later episodes will deal with world music highlights such as Talking Timbuktu, Meeting By The River, and of course Buena Vista Social Club. We will also take a close l...

We end our second season with what can be called Cooder's last classic album: Get Rhythm. As the title suggests, it's all about energy, speed and fun. It presents us with Cooder's very own world music and should have been a real chart breaker. Instead, it was just another solo effort with disappointing commercial results. Its release in 1987 was framed by two tours. We listen in on the famous Sant...

Cooder was not involved in the original development of John Hiatt's Bring The Family, nor did he act as producer, as he did a year later with Bobby King and Terry Evans. Nevertheless, this album is more significant than most of his previous session work and became something of a blueprint for the next phase of his career after Get Rhythm from the same year. It would be a period in which solo album...

Robert Johnson was one of the most important blues guitarists of all time. Cooder didn't cover any of Johnson's songs on his early albums, which is kind of a surprise when you think about it. But in the mid-eighties, a project came along that more than made up for the wait. Crossroads, another Walter Hill film, was a wonderful journey into the history of the blues. It led back to the roots of the...

We're actually talking about a whole bunch of projects in this episode: 1985's Brewster's Millions, the rare case of a Cooder film comedy; the quirky TV western Tall Tales & Legends; the five-time Golden Raspberry Award nominee Blue City, a film we certainly wouldn't be talking about today without Cooder's contribution. Our little mid-'80s journey also includes three session albums, a festival...