Ry Cooder says that when you get the blues, you should Get Rhythm. And you should always listen to Ry.
And the bonus track (is it a bonus track if I always add one?): The Very Thing.
And what the hell. The last time I found some Ry Cooder clips on YouTube they disappeared before I had a chance to blog them. So I'm packing a third one in. Here's Smack Dab In The Middle.
Oh, gosh, those were fun, pogge. Really got the ole chair rockin' this mornin'.
Ooo. Boy singers! If I get another crack at this living biz, I'm coming back as a chick singer.
I drove down the 401 coming back from the Kingston Blues festival today and introduced my daughter to some Ry Cooder on the car tape deck (ok, it's an older car). I introduced her to Janis Joplin last spring, and she understood, perhaps was shaken, at Janis' power. A power based in vulnerability, which has gone out of fashion.
"Always lift him up and never put him down" - a Ry Cooder song capturing poignantly our grandparents language and world view. "Every woman I know, is crazy bout an automobile" - sheer joyous exuberant unpredicable funk. "I got mine" - Cooder is a blackman trapped in a white one-eyed body- an outlaw black tune. "Borgeouis Blues" (which I think may have been written or at least recorded by Woodie Guthrie) - with lines like "White folk in Washington, they know how, To call a coloured man a nigger just to see him bow"
Ry Cooder is immeasureable.
Bourgeois Blues - written by Huddie Ledbetter/Alan Lomax.
Here's ol' Taj (he da man!) kickin' it on 'The Bourgeois Blues'
The delightful fact is that Taj and Ry played together in a band when they were both starting out on the east coast. There is even a recording I think. I can't think of this without some kind of little shiver ever since I first heard it. Taj and Ry are so similar in the wellsprings of their music that they HAD to meet sometime. Amazing it happened right at the beginning. Taj is about the closest thing to pure sunshine, musically, philosophically and socially that I've ever encountered. Ry and Taj - how perfectly fitting. Maybe the universe is unfolding the way it's supposed to.