Sherry Chandler

It’s the anniversary of Patsy Cline’s death birthday. Here’s Wikipedia’s case for Cline as a history maker:

Owing to her determination, outspoken nature, strong will, and a self-confidence that was a somewhat rare trait for women in Country Music at that time, Cline was the first female in the industry to prove that she could surpass her male competitors in terms of record sales and concert tickets. She headlined Carnegie Hall with fellow Opry members, The Hollywood Bowl with Johnny Cash, and eventually had her own show in Las Vegas in 1962, becoming the first female Country star to headline a show in Vegas. Cline is often considered a “heroine” by her female contemporaries, who claim that she broke down doors in the industry for women. Cline also reinvented her style by shedding her Western cowgirl outfits for elegant sequined gowns, cocktail dresses, and spiked heels. Cline’s style in fashion and music were mocked at first by many but quickly copied.

Ry Cooder thinks music took a wrong turn with The Beatles.

‘Rock as it is known today just doesn’t interest me at all,’ he said [in interviews thirty years ago] and nothing has changed. ‘I hate commercial music,’ he tells me. ‘If I hear that money in it, all that winking and nodding… It kills me.’

This from the man who helped invent the sixties, the man who, with Taj Mahal, was “The Rising Sons,” the man who played with Captain Beefheart, the man whose licks Keith Richards stole.

Well, The Beatles are mostly dead and those who are alive have turned into something strange while Jagger and Richards take the stage like computer-animated mummies, but Bob Dylan is doing some of his best work, Randy Newman finally won an Oscar, and Ry Cooder is working again.

Due for release tomorrow, his new album, “My Name is Buddy,” tells the story of Lefty, a left-wing mouse, blind Tom Toad (and the pun on Tom Joad cannot be accidental), and Buddy, a red tomcat, based on Cooder’s own resident tom, looking for his next meal. They’re hobos on their way to California.

‘I used to take the train up to Santa Barbara to see my grandparents,’ says Cooder… ‘You’d look off and there’d be a little hobo jungle right in the trees by the railway tracks,’ he continues. ‘They used to fascinate me. “Who are those people?” “Hobos.” “What are they doing there?” …These little cardboard boxes… these lean-to shacks.’

‘It was those kind of people who built the country. Billionaires don’t make countries - all they do is make money.’ Such aphorisms trip off his tongue. ‘But they created a kind of society that is disappearing. It’s all still relevant. History is continuous.’

The players on the album include Paddy Maloney “playing tin whistle like gold dust” and Mike and Pete Seeger.

‘We’re the old-time cats,’ Cooder says. ‘All that white hair. …’Look at anyone who’s been in it all their life… if they’ve got their health, if they’ve been lucky enough, then that’s when you begin to hear something really good. Sure, you can always hear when someone’s singing, “I’m happening, I’m young, I’m strong, I’ve got the thing”, but [when people are older] you can also hear this weird transcendence. In one note.’

Not a surprising statement, I suppose, from a man who broke the Trading with the Enemy Act to bring us the “Buena Vista Social Club.” Cooder was always interested in “roots music” and in “the people.” He might be compared to Carl Sandburg in that way.

‘I don’t understand the public,’ he says, ‘but I do believe the public is oversold and underrated every day. Give the people something interesting, something to chew on, I say.’

I’ve stolen way too much from this article in The Observer. But I’m hungry for this news of Ry Cooder and I have to suppose you are too. The article is worth reading in its entirety. I want to leave you with one more gem.

Asked why he is recording under his own name again at 60:

‘Well, goddam it!’ says Cooder testily. ‘I know who Buddy is. Nobody else does but me.’

It’s why we write.