Back to the roots

Anyone who reads this space with some regularity knows my taste for what’s known as roots music: blues, country, hillbilly twang, zydeco, down east fiddling, gospel, bluegrass, string bands and all manner of backwoods thrumming, caterwauling and just plain high-spirited (and sometimes lowdown too) music of all sorts. Thus, my recent discovery of Catfish Records and its "Roots Of" series has been a rare thrill. Taken together, it’s a river of influence, a big muddy of blues and country and points in between, the collective inspiration for many of the great artists of the past four decades or so: Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, The Grateful Dead, Elvis, Dylan. (Catfish also has a wonderful array of work from the likes of folk hero Woodie Guthie, gospel diva Mahalia Jackson and ragtime whiz Scott Joplin.) The newest offering I’ve seen is "The Roots of Ry Cooder." Cooder is an electifying slide guitar player with a winning, down-home voice, the composer of many movie soundtracks (among them “Crossroads,” “Paris, Texas” and “Primary Colors”), and the best archeologist of roots music since Alan Lomax. Latterly, he’s shepherded infectious Cuban music into the spotlight through The Buena Vista Social Club and the documentary film made about it. All that work has made his own roster of albums less frequent than his fans would like. He hasn’t recorded an individual album since 1987’s "Get Rhythm," so the next best thing is to track his musical influences. They become apparent immediately. Cooder’s first album, "Ry Cooder" (1969), featured songs such as "Goin’ to Brownsville," "Pig Meat" and "Dark Was the Night." On this album, you get the originals, by Sleepy John Estes, Leadbelly ("Pigmeat Papa") and Blind Willie Johnson, respectively. Especially on the latter, you can hear intimations of Cooder in Johnson’s stunning guitar playing. This works for all Cooder’s albums. "Into the Purple Valley" also mined a rich past, with "Vigilante Man," "On a Monday" and "Taxes on the Farmer." Their originals are here, too, from Woodie Guthrie, Leadbelly again, and Fiddlin’ John Carson, a raw semi-amateur who made the original of this protest song, then called "Taxes on the Farmer Feeds Them All," in the depths of the Depression. Leadbelly makes two further appearances, with "Bourgois Blues" and "Irene" (more familiar as Goodnight Irene), both of which Cooder recorded on 1976’s "Chicken Skin Music." The 21 tracks also feature work by the great primitive bluesman Robert Johnson ("Cross Road Blues"), Blind Blake ("Diddie Wah Diddie"), Mississippi John Hurt ("Candy Man Blues") and a number of others. It would have been fun to have the originals of the slightly more rhythm and blues compositions Cooder covered, such as Chuck Berry’s "13 Question Method" or Eddie Floyd’s (or Wilson Pickett’s) "634-5789." Still, you can’t have everything, though this comes pretty close. Speaking of Chuck Berry, his own roots were explored in an earlier Catfish entry, "The Roots of Chuck Berry," which has a more swingy, even Tin Pan Alleyish feel than the Cooder album, and features 20 tracks by the likes of Louis Jordan ("Ain’t That Just Like a Woman" and "Run Joe"), the King Cole Trio ("Route 66," also to be pivotal for The Rolling Stones), Duke Ellington ("I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So") and Ella Mae Morse’s boogie-woogieish "The House of Blue Lights." But there’s also very bluesy material in Elmore James’s "Dust My Broom," Memphis Slim’s "Beer Drinking Woman" and Tampa Red’s wonderful "Don’t You Lie to Me." Other standouts I’ve heard are "The Roots of Canned Heat," which locates that California band’s style firmly in the Mississippi delta, and features Charlie Patton, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Blind Willie McTell (the number of blind bluesmen is astonishing) and Muddy Waters, who gets his own fine entry in the series. For a countrified change of pace, there’s "The Roots of Johnny Cash," with the Carter Family (he liked them so much he married one of them), Bob Wills, Hank Williams and the singing brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers. Toe-tapping, moving and instructive, all at once.

Photo Credit: rylanders.free-online.co.uk