Ry Cooder – Working man blues
Over the course of his 40-some-year career, Cooder has worked with everyone from Jackie DeShannon and Captain Beefheart to Earl Hines and the Rolling Stones, as well as making a name for himself in Hollywood by writing some of the most imaginative movie soundtracks around. Through it all he has never stopped singing the working-class blues. Most recently, he produced Mavis Staples’ forthcoming We’ll Never Turn Back, a stirring album of freedom songs reimagined for the social and economic injustices of today. (See p. 8 of this issue for more on that project.)
“People don’t know this history anymore,” Cooder says. “All these young parents and these little kids, they live in almost total ignorance of American history, which is very rich and colorful and sort of mysterious — poignant really. So I got to thinking, ‘How would you go about telling them about it?'”
The music wouldn’t be a problem. The challenge, when it came to addressing this culture of silence, was to tell the story in a fresh enough way to ensure that it didn’t fall on deaf ears. The solution was inspired in part by Pogo, the beloved cartoon character created by Walt Kelly (the man who, fittingly enough for Cooder’s purposes, also said, “We have met the enemy and he is us”). Instead of having his at times knotty messages about class and race come from yet another talking (or singing) human head, Cooder figured having a furry creature deliver it would not only pique people’s curiosities, but would make what he had to say go down a little easier.
“I said to myself, wait a minute. Nobody wants to hear someone like me sounding off about this stuff. But if an animal speaks about this — a simplified version, in other words; a working-class farm animal like a cat — well, you can say things you might not otherwise be able to say. Human consciousness is far too complicated and managed and twisted and turned, but not the point of view of Buddy. He’s close to the earth and all. He’s down there seeing these things simply.
“The ideal setting for this,” Cooder continues, “is where the little kid says, ‘Mommy, why is Buddy in jail?’ And then the mommy says, ‘Well, there was a miners’ strike.’ And then the little kid says, ‘Mommy, what’s a miners’ strike?’ And then the parent goes, ‘Well, uh, let’s see. Let’s look into this a little.’
“That’s the ideal anyway. It might never happen like that, but it got me going.”
Back in the 1980s I came across an essay in a magazine that made a case for poetry ultimately being a more powerful vehicle for revolution than tanks. At the time, it struck me as a quixotic claim, the sort of thing that grad students like me enjoyed arguing about at parties; yet, much like “Buddy,” the more I thought about it, the more the idea gained traction.
In Buddy’s case, that force lies in the notion of striking a bond with a stranger, of opening oneself up to a species whose ways are foreign to your own, and then allowing that otherness to challenge and enrich you. And yet Cooder doesn’t just have his characters embody this ethic of solidarity; he drives his point home further through the album’s musical arrangements and collaborations. He shows, for example, how a ditty such as “Footprints In The Snow”, a song associated with bluegrass and Appalachian culture, can work when played as a conjunto-style polka (itself an idiom adapted by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from accordion-playing German, Czech, and Polish immigrants).
These aren’t just whimsical gambols; Cooder’s recontextualizations carry moral and ethical freight. Just as Buddy did when he crossed the tracks and threw in with Lefty, Cooder shows how two putatively disparate species of music can inhabit the same universe. Where some people only see otherness and division, Cooder persistently spies opportunities for kinship and inclusion, suggesting ways that people of different nations, faiths, and races can forge stronger and more sustainable connections.
The same goes for the ensemble Cooder gathered to play on the album, a cast of pickers and singers consisting of different races, genders, generations, and ethnicities who commingle a variety of musical genres. Everything from jazz and blues to bluegrass and honky-tonk is stirred into Buddy’s story, even a little Tex-Mex and stray-cat rock ‘n’ roll. Cooder finds power in these unions, just as Buddy discovers there’s strength in working men and women coming together to combat the forces that conspire to oppress them.
“Music is a perfect model for this,” Cooder explains. “When I first met Flaco Jimenez many years back, he didn’t even know a black person. He’d seen them, because they lived in San Antonio too, but they had a tremendous fear and race prejudice. And vice versa. I put a group together with four black singers and Flaco’s conjunto band from west San Antonio [for the making of his 1976 live album Showtime and its subsequent tour] and let me tell you, people told me I was crazy — just insane. They said, ‘You can’t do that. They can’t get along.’
“But they did. It wasn’t easy, but the end result is that today, we can go in the studio and Flaco knows exactly where there that accordion belongs in that old black hymn because we’ve done it for almost 30 years.”
As Cooder’s anecdote attests, it takes work, in some case years of it, for people of different cultures to come together, just as it requires effort to create a just society and world, justice being what Buddy ultimately is all about. “Justice is the key to everything,” Cooder says. “If you find justice you find peace. You can’t have one without the other. And if you don’t have justice you don’t have peace. And who gains?
“I’ve always looked at things in terms of who got paid off and who paid — as Buddy would say, ‘I’m not gonna fight your rich man’s war. I’m not gonna do this.’ You know, what gain and what price is paid? Because we don’t have justice right now. Instead we have armament and disempowerment.”
Cooder recalls a conversation he had recently with some longshoremen friends of his, umpteenth-generation L.A. Chicanos who live in east Los Angeles. “I was talking with Fernando, he’s my age, and he said that as far as the unions are concerned, it’s over. When General Motors defaults on its pension program for all of its workers, it’s over. You know it’s absolutely over.
“Jobs went overseas, all of that criminality,” Cooder continues. “I was listening to the radio and somebody on some show was saying that no one wants to call themselves a working man anymore. That’s just not where it’s at. I see this in Los Angeles all the time. People want to be identified in a sort of managed consumer way. What SUV do you drive that you got on credit that you’re never gonna pay for? Or, you know, your clothes. They mark and label you as being this or that.