Ry Cooder My Name Is Buddy CD

Personnel: Ry Cooder (vocals, guitar, bajo sexto, banjo, mandola, keyboards); Ry Cooder (bass instrument); Buddy Red Cat (vocals, guitar); Roland White (vocals, mandolin); Julliette Cammagere, Bobby "Blanco" King, Bobby King , Juliette Commagere (vocals); Paddy Moloney (whistling, whistle, Uilleann pipe); Lefty Mouse (fiddle); Reverend Tom Toad (tambourine); Terry Evans (vocals); Mike Seeger (banjo, fiddle, harmonica); Pete Seeger (banjo); Flaco Jiménez (accordion); Jon Hassell (trumpet); Jacky Terrasson, Van Dyke Parks (piano); Joachim Cooder (keyboards, drums, percussion); Jim Keltner (drums).
Recording information: Beacon, NY; Chateau Martin, Los Angeles, CA; Orange Stella Studio, Santa Monica, CA; Sound City Studios, Van Nuys, CA.
Photographer: Susan Titelman.
With a concept that could have failed on so many levels in lesser hands, Ry Cooder stuns once again in MY NAME IS BUDDY and demonstrates why he is one of America's most adventurous musicians. His chosen material is a loose collection of animal character sketches--the titular Buddy is a cat--based on labor struggles and the lower class in Depression-era America. Think of it as Woody Guthrie meets Beatrix Potter.
While an odd construct on page for a man that jammed with Beefheart, the Stones, and the Buena Vista Social Club, MY NAME IS BUDDY flies with every track. The stellar cast of musicians includes the brothers Seeger, Van Dyke Parks, Jim Keltner, Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains, and Flaco Jimenez, and grounds the fairy tale atmosphere with musical blood and guts. The ensembles tear through early-19th-century forms (country blues, bluegrass, and old-time arrangements) with a rollicking flair.
During the present era, as the Iraq war grinds on, Americans are trying belly-button gazing, trying to remember a history where America regarded itself as world citizen, and came to the aid of many nations in trouble and nearing despair. It is true that this is part of our national heritage and America as a whole is, or at least used to be, known the globe over for the generosity of its people. Like any story, there are multiple narrative threads at work in defining such a history, and at least one has been all but forgotten and virtually erased by numerous politicos since the 1980s. Ry Cooder's My Name Is Buddy offers a view of an America in deep trouble with itself during the Great Depression when it either couldn't -- or wouldn't? -- feed its own people. Cooder's narrative is told in his own versions of folk tales through the voices of Buddy Red Cat, Lefty Mouse, and the Reverend Tom Toad. They are set during the Dust Bowl era of the '30s when many people were economically forced to relocate or become ramblers and hoboes, roaming listlessly over the continental terrain. The truth behind these stories is an official part of American history, yet they were all but absent in "popular culture" during the last two decades with few exceptions. Music has recently -- in the mid-'90s tribute to Woody Guthrie, and in the music of Bruce Springsteen, Michael Franti, Mike Ness, and Bob Dylan -- addressed this period and on occasion gotten into the charts.
The politics here are unapologetically left of center: J. Edgar Hoover is portrayed in a song about a pig bearing his name, a copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital adorns the inside cover (one of the beautiful illustrations by Vincent Valdes), the songs are chock-full of unions and strikes, labor and hobo camps, big bosses, sundown towns, bigotry, and corruption. The lyrics have their fair share of real anger in them, though there is no political sloganeering or sermonizing -- just check out "One Cat, One Vote, One Beer" -- Cooder uses humor instead. He introduces each of the 17 tunes with prosaic vignettes (one for each track) in the CD booklet; these provide the context of each song. Old-timey string band music, blues, bluegrass, country, polka, jazz, corridos, and more are the musical vehicles these tunes travel the raiRolling Stone (p.90) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "Cooder employs the pitch-perfect instrumentation that he's famous for, featuring gutbucket blues and old-timey, PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION fare..."
Q (p.117) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "[A] typically thorough exploration of raw American folk, dustbowl blues, jazz and country, all laced with Steinbeck-ian working-class socialism."