The oddest ideas sometimes come in the mail. A couple of years ago when Ry Cooder was putting some final touches to Chavez Ravine, his inspired album of songs excavating the Hispanic community that was bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium in LA, he received through the post a picture of Leadbelly. In place of the bluesman's face were the Photoshopped features of a red tom cat. The picture came from a friend without much explanation; Cooder stored it in his head, mulled it over and, when he had finished Chavez Ravine, saw a way he could build a story, a sequel even, around it.
It's an album that's a fine summation of Cooder's multifaceted musical career to date, but goes a step further by speaking more loudly than ever with his own voice. Some albums need time to become classic, but for Cooder My Name is Buddy is an instant masterpiece. Other productions from Ry Cooder. Election Special. Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down.
My Name is Buddy is the hugely entertaining result of that mulling. It's a road trip through vernacular American music, dustbowl blues, gospel, folk and bluegrass in the company of three unlikely characters: Buddy Red Cat, a hobo tabby - 'I just got my suitcase in my hand, walked across the tracks, caught me the end of an old freight train, and never did look back' - and the friends he meets along the way: Lefty the Mouse, a union rodent till he dies, and the Reverend Tom Toad, a blind, gospel-singing, guitar-playing amphibian, forced out of his home by the Ku Klux Klan.
It sounds a little like Animal Farm as conceived by Woody Guthrie, or Bruce Springsteen's take on Wind in the Willows. It's Tom Waits in his Mule Variations phase, minus some of the dislocation and rasp. It comes with a little book written by Cooder in the voice of Red Cat giving the back story of the songs: 'This happened in Stockton, California. We heard that Carlos Bulosan himself was going to give a talk to some fruit-pickers over at the Filipino dance hall after the dancing got through ...' It adds up to a light-hearted, sometimes poignant elegy for the American working man and his music, for the days of 'labour, big bosses, farm failures, strikes, company cops and sundown towns'.
Cooder has assembled his usual stellar cast of musicians to accompany him on this journey: Red Cat's wanderings are haunted by the tin whistle of Paddy Maloney, the original Chieftain, and by the bluegrass mandolin genius Roland White. There's authentic guttural blues on tracks like 'Sundown Town' and lounge jazz featuring the piano of Jacky Terrasson on 'Green Dog', but the dominant themes are home-made and toe-tapping.
For the brilliant 'J Edgar', a tribute to a homburg-hatted pig who couldn't stop taking more than his share - 'J Edgar, J Edgar just look what you've done/ You've eaten up the cherry pie that was for everyone' - Cooder teams up with folk veterans Mike and Pete Seeger on duelling banjos to great effect. It's all played lovingly, in homage to the local and the lost, but with more than the odd wink towards good-natured pastiche. At one point Cooder wraps his voice around a wonderful heartbreaky Hank Williams tribute, 'Who says cats can't understand a real good country song?' and lets you guess about the tone.
In all of this, as with Chavez Ravine, Cooder demonstrates how he has brought home the lessons he learned producing the Buena Vista Social Club in Cuba, reminding himself that the most authentic music is always just around the corner. 'We're not doing this to be nostalgic,' he says; he believes the issues and the sounds are just as urgent as they ever were. He makes a strong case, and anyhow, as a slogan 'One cat, one vote, one beer' would be hard to beat in any era.