Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

I first met Ry Cooder’s music in 1969 through my best friend in high school, Rina Slavin, who had some of the best cultural taste around. She had an amazing Skip James record and whenever I heard that high-pitched wail of a voice it sent shivers up and down my spine. Rina also owned Paradise and Lunch and it was a revelation. I’d never heard anything like it. It was love at first hearing. I’ve gobbled up just about everything Ry’s done since as well.

What’s Ry Cooder up to these days? It’s been two years since he released the remarkable Chavez Ravine, an enormous feat of musical and historical storytelling about L.A.’s vanished Hispanic neighborhood. While he was completing that album, Ry received a mysterious package from a friend containing little more than a faded newspaper clipping about a Vancouver cat who lived–and died–in a battered suitcase. So began the legend of Buddy the Cat. Cooder has imagined a life for good old Buddy, a rich, well-traveled life in which he’s rubbed shoulders with some of the great musical and political heroes of the 20th century movements for social justice. It promises to be a tour de force of the imagination.

Though this is an mp3 blog, unfortunately I don’t have an mp3 to share with you of the music from Buddy. But I have the next best thing. Ry’s publicist, Shore Fire, has a jukebox on their site which plays the terrific, gritty Three Chords and the Truth (what a great song title, no?). Helping Cooder on the vocals is (if my ears heard right) the country music legend Harlan Howard:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Standing in the prison yard
They were taking poor Joe, chained and bound
To a Utah firing squad

Well, he turned and looked at me right then
Saying: “Don’t you be misled (?)
They’re trying to tear our free speech down
But Buddy ain’t near quit yet

They framed me on a killing charge
You know I wouldn’t lie to you
But the only crime here that I done
Was three chords and the truth”

Three chords and the truth
Well, the only crime that Joe Hill done was
Three chords and the truth

When he sang his good old union songs
He got his message through
But they couldn’t stand it, how a working man
Sang three chords and the truth

Ol’ J. Edgar Hoover liked to hear the Darkies sing
But one man changed that all around
Paul Robeson was a man that you couldn’t ignore
That’s what drove J. Edgar down
He called up his New York Klan-boy friends
Saying: “I got something good for you
Get right down there to Peekskill New York town
And kill three chords and the truth”

Three chords and the truth
Well, the only crime you ever got from Paul
Was three chords and the truth

If this is a land of democracy
I’ve got one question for you
Why wasn’t Paul Robeson set free
On three chords and the truth?

Now, they took Pete Seeger before the law
Put him on the witness stand
But he stood right up to tyranny
With just a banjo in his hand

Such a righteous banjo picker
Watchin’ out for me and you
That was just a man that wouldn’t back down
On three chords and the truth

Three chords and the truth
Well, the only crime Pete Seeger done
Was three chords and the truth

Yeah, he sang his freedom songs real good
Still gettin’ his message through
Better check out on Pete Seeger
On three chords and the truth

Three chords and the truth
Better check out your old friend Buddy right now
On three chords and the truth

–Three Chords and the Truth, Ry Cooder

When you open the jukebox, you will have to keep clicking Next till you see Ry’s song.

The song is masterful, a tour de force of politically-engaged songwriting. Also, it’s sense of connectedness to America’s social history, along with its appreciation of the critical role played by America’s songwriters in that struggle, is extraordinary. This is one of the best political engaged songs since Steve Earle’s Christmas in Washington (hear it).

Yesterday, I went searching the net for information about the new record. Most sites contain only the basics. But Shore Fire, a public relations firm which seems to represent many progressive musicians including Ry does a bang up job of profiling both Cooder and his pending musical project. Those of you who’ve heard Ry Cooder speak or read one of his interviews will be used to his twisting, turning, ironic discursive style. It’s the talk of a mad genius. Those of you who’ve heard Ry’s music but haven’t had a taste of Ry, the eccentric are in for a wild and crazy ride.

Here is the description of the mysterious birth of the new project:

Not quite two years ago, Ry Cooder was knee-deep in some ninth-inning tinkering, finishing up his forthcoming album, Chavez Ravine, when a peculiar message sailed in – one could say – from deep out-of-left-field.

It arrived by way of U.S. Mail, slipped into a nondescript, manila envelope, addressed in an old friend’s recognizable scrawl. Inside, he found a familiar image of the great bluesman, Leadbelly. Yet, photo-shopped in place of his face was that of a red cat; an inscrutable, seen-it-all expression hovering in his eyes. He found little else, except a web address and this note: “You’ll know what to do with this.”

In that image of Leadbelly as Buddy, we can see the outlines of the tremendous American picaresque adventure Cooder imagines for his feline friend. To my mind, Buddy may enter the pantheon of American adventurers alongside those other mythic figures, Paul Bunyan and John Henry.

This is all we ever hear about the real-life Buddy:

After some initial poking around to learn this red cat’s name (“Buddy”) and a bit of his vagabond story (he was found in the alley behind a record store in Vancouver, living in a suitcase, and he’d passed away in 2005) he [Cooder] pushed it aside to tie up pressing loose ends. But the notion had already crawled up inside somewhere deep in his imagination.

Here the article describes how Cooder fleshed out both the musical and narrative profile of Buddy’s story. The political character of the story also begins taking shape:

“Over time something was coming to me,” he says. Propulsive rhythms and hardscrabble stories and scraps of ocher-toned melodies began to spin ‘round inside. “I kept thinking ‘red cat’ . . . and I kept hearing an old Charlie Poole song – a cadence.” It began to slide together. “He’s a red cat – not just red colored – but he’s a union man. He becomes Red.” Next, a piece of lyric. ‘I’m a red cat til I die. . .’ ” Soon enough, the itinerant Buddy had a back-story; some fellow travelers he meets along the road – Lefty the Mouse, the Reverend Tom Toad – a past and a future; a story to tell.

The following passage places My Name is Buddy into the context of Cooder’s earlier musical career and notes its connection to his early records, which attempted to recover the tradition of American roots music:

“‘My Name Is Buddy’: Another Record by Ry Cooder” is, in a certain respect, Ry Cooder circling back, revisiting a body of music that has for much of his life held a certain fascination. “When I first started doing records. I thought, ‘I like these old songs. These dustbowl songs.’ So I made a couple of records and people thought: ‘What’s this?’ You can’t sell this.’ But I kept making these things, again and again, because I knew a good song,” he says. “I’d say it’s taken me 40 years to get it right.”

Here the author further contextualizes Buddy within American musical and historical tradition and provides a glimpse of Cooder’s musical influences for the songs he wrote:

While the album weaves through a history of American, regional music – blues, folk, bluegrass with flavors of storefront spirituals and lounge jazz folded in, it also takes a turn through America’s philosophical soul – songs of strivers, of union men, church folk and those down-at-the-heel heroes. If the music feels familiar, their melodies recognizable, they should, says Cooder. Many of them have hovered in our collective backspace for decades. “Most of these songs are based on other tunes, some of them hymns.” Shot through as well are nods or allusions to Reverend Gary Davis, Earl Robinson, Harland Howard, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, the protest songs of labor organizer and songwriter, Joe Hill.

Ry chose some wonderful collaborators to “tell” this record. I find it a delicious irony that Pete Seeger not only becomes his music collaborator, but becomes one of the musical heroes Cooder enshrined in the lyrics of the songs thanks to his seminal participation in the Weavers and as Woody Guthrie’s musical partner:

To tell it properly, musically, Cooder went to key source folk” – tenders of the True Vine of American hearth music: He traveled to Beacon, N.Y., and sat in with Mike and Pete Seeger for an historic session (“J. Edgar”) in Pete’s living room, featuring the two brothers on twin banjos. He rounded up bluegrass mandolin maestro Roland White and Cheftains leader Paddy Maloney. He called on old friends and frequent musical companions, Jim Keltner, Van Dyke Parks, Flaco Jimenez, Mike Elizondo and his son, Joachim Cooder.

Here Cooder, in his inimitably eccentric way describes the folk process that leads to the creation of that extraordinary musical idiom, American roots music:

“I’ve always been interested in American vernacular music. How people sat in separate towns and wrote songs and played their instruments. I’ve always been interested in how they arrived at the songs, how they got into them, who taught them how to play their guitar, their fiddle. How they learned to hold it. And how it changed, from town to town, every 20 miles or so, like language, And how, before recordings, it all spread throughout America.”

Though, “My Name is Buddy,” feels authentic, like some lost artifact plucked out of time, it is full of urgent resonance. “We’re not doing this,” Cooder stresses, “to be nostalgic.” — especially when so many of the same issues plague and flummox us today – bigotry, poverty, violence, greed, fair-access.

“I loved these songs; I love the melodies and the messages.

…The idea is to craft them into something your own. “Many of these songs had a warning to the ‘working man’ folded in – especially those 19th Century songs in three-quarter time. It was the very reason for singing. Those songs were about topical things. They were vehicles for people who had a point to get across,” says Cooder. “Otherwise, there is no point in doing it.”

I, for one, can’t wait for the record’s release.

I want to specially thank Shorefire for this tremendous piece of writing from which I quoted extensively. It’s so wonderfully original, I didn’t know how to summarize it so I didn’t even try.