The Wizard of Slide

It is called "slide" or "bottleneck," a style of guitar playing in which something like a piece of broken glass is used to fret the strings to produce a strong, lowdown sound. A few decades ago it was the sound of a whole genus of American music that might be called backroads blues. Today its best exponent is Ry Cooder, a guitarist and singer of wry wit and concentrated energy who has extended the troubadour tradition of Woody Guthrie and fashioned a distinctive personality for himself from the shards of the American musical past.

When Ry (short for Ryland) Cooder's fourth and latest album, Paradise and Lunch, popped up at the shallow end of the charts this summer, the reaction at Warner Bros. Records was gratification tinged with a trace of awe. Cooder has no gruesomely elaborate stagecraft or lifestyle, and his work is not the sort that goes down easily with Carly Simon fans or Elton John aficionados. His music is elegantly eclectic, running from Leadbelly and Sleepy John Estes blues numbers through main-line ballads of the 1940s to reggae and rock 'n' roll. "Ry's pure," says a record producer who has worked with him. "He's scrupulous in everything he does. He's never false or stagey."

When Warners first signed Cooder five years ago, he had worked as a session man around Los Angeles and with the Rolling Stones in England. His dexterous rhythm work on guitar and mandolin had won him a reputation as a good musician who could juice up anyone's record, and he played behind everyone from Captain Beefheart and the Everly Brothers to Paul Anka. His work on the sound track of 1970's Performance, a movie of scattershot brilliance about a gangster and a rock star, further keyed up interest in Cooder's own album debut. "I think the people at the record company expected some kind of wild-assed rock-'n'-roller," Cooder recalls of that first solo album. "I gave 'em something a little different."

That something was essentially what he had learned as a kid hanging around folk clubs in Los Angeles, where he was born 27 years ago. He listened to groups like the New Lost City Ramblers and offered old bluesmen passing through town five bucks to play for him so that he could learn the intricate picking styles that were fading into obscurity. His first albums reflect his drive to build a kind of historical mythology out of the music of the recent American past. He sings of grifters and gamblers, outlaws and farmers, offers reflections on taxes, infidelity, the lot of the poor man, and occasionally includes moral injunctions like the following, from an early 1930s tune called Denomination Blues by a singing preacher named Washington Phillips:

/ want to tell you people, it's a natural

fact, Every man don't understand the

Bible alike...

You can go to your college, you can

go to your school, If you ain 'tgot Jesus, you's an

educated fool.

Cooder is a revisionist, an adapter, not an original composer. He snuggles into history like a time traveler, singing in a husky, good-natured voice that carefully preserves a ragged edge. But it is his w12ardry with a bottleneck that gives him a tangible link with the old Delta bluesmen. Cooder applies the neck of a vinegar bottle to his Martin D45 guitar and makes the music ring, giving the notes a natural resonance in which you can almost hear the past.

Cooder is not bound to reproduce old music intact. He sometimes uses orchestration and can find new emphasis in a tune by changing the usual arrangement. Thus a World War II song called Comin' In on a Wing and a Prayer, which he sings low and slow, loses its Tin Pan Alley patriotism and becomes plaintive, full of battle fear. An old calypso tune, F.D.R. in Trinidad, is delivered with careful ingenuousness, and Cooder brightly, as if inadvertently, stresses the irony that time has worked on the lyrics: "Mr. Cordell Hull in attendance/ They took part in a peace conference/ To stop war and atrocity and make the world safe for democracy/ The greatest event in the century in the interest of suffering humanity."

Cooder discovers his songs through friends or, as he himself puts it, "by keeping my ears open and my memory running back to the days when I was starting out." His record collection is small, running mostly to comparatively obscure ethnic labels like Arhoolie and buttressed by Harry Smith's three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways, which he calls both "a terrific collection" and "a good place to turn for a little juice." Studiously avoiding the heavy-rock social scene, Cooder lives with his wife Susan in a roomy house in Santa Monica, Calif., with studios in the basement where he can practice and she can paint and sculpt. Affable enough but always a little shy, he has one eye slightly askew and wears his long hair tied back in a tail, which gives him the look of a congenial, landlocked buccaneer. His sense of humor is spiked with sardonic throwaway lines (he calls dilettante English Rockers who love American blues "tea bags"). Cooder likes to stay close to home, but when he must go to L.A., he dresses his otherwise modest person in smashing, vibrant shirts made especially for him by a neighbor friend named Sumiko and drives into town in a '55 Nash Rambler ("the only unhip car I could find").

This month Cooder began an eight-week tour round the U.S. with his friend Randy Newman; after that, he will get down to serious work on his next album. The contents remain uncertain, but Cooder is currently fascinated by the work of a Tex-Mex accordionist named Flaco Jimenez. He has also just returned from a trip to Hawaii, where he and some Hawaiians spent two weeks making and taping some music of the islands --"not really antique stuff," he says, "just Hawaiian drinking-and-good-time songs from before the war, the kind of thing you never hear back here." That is part of Cooder's unique gift: to make the country come together in its music, Delta to Dust Bowl, city to small town to island. This also makes him one of the most generative talents working in popular music today. And that, as the song says, is a natural fact.

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