Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder's third album is a grimy exploration of the blues, where he takes on songs by Sleepy John Estes and Skip James while injecting his own brand of lazy soul into a host of traditional tracks. Not the most distinctive of vocalists, Cooder has a crunchy bottleneck style that takes center stage throughout, especially on the instrumental "Dark End Of The Street."

The phenomenon of the session man-turned-solo artist is one of the current scourges of
the music business. But Ry Cooder, session man nonpareil, fortunately defies the pattern.
In an interview last year in Sing Out, Ry stated, "I [played] with studio people and went
through that whole scene.... First I was intimidated by it, which is understandable because
it was so slick and polished and everybody was so 'right on' all the time and laug... More >

Enslaved by the tradition of the new, I prefer the Cooder who rediscovers material I never dreamed existed to the Cooder who replicates Sleepy John Estes and Skip James. Especially since one of the Estes songs he's found is of even more dubious interest than Estes's singing style, while the James instrumental is a confusingly airy interlude between his two most gratifying discoveries: "Boomer's Story" and "Crow Black Chicken." Bonus: Cooder's impression of John Fahey playing "Dark End of the Street." (Grade - B)