1960s Cooder performed as part of a
pickup trio with
Bill Monroe and
Doc Watson, in which he played
banjo. The trio was not successful, but reflecting his early exposure to the instrument, Cooder subsequently applied banjo tunings and the
three finger roll to guitar. Cooder first attracted attention playing with
Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, notably on the 1967 album
Safe as Milk, after previously having worked with
Taj Mahal and
Ed Cassidy in the
Rising Sons. At a vital "warm-up" performance at the
Mt. Tamalpais Festival (June 10–11, 1967) shortly before the scheduled
Monterey Pop Festival (June 16–18, 1967), the band began to play "
Electricity" and
Don Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the stage and landed on manager
Bob Krasnow. He later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth. This aborted any opportunity for breakthrough success at Monterey, for Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet, effectively quitting both the event and the band on the spot. Cooder also played with
Randy Newman, including on
12 Songs.
Van Dyke Parks worked with Newman and Cooder during the 1960s. Parks arranged Cooder's "One Meatball" according to Parks' 1984 interview with Bob Claster. Cooder was a
session musician on various recording sessions with
the Rolling Stones in 1968 and 1969, and his contributions appear on the albums
Let It Bleed (
Yank Rachell-style mandolin on "
Love in Vain"), and
Sticky Fingers, on which he contributed the slide guitar on "
Sister Morphine". During this period, Cooder joined with
Mick Jagger,
Charlie Watts,
Bill Wyman, and longtime Rolling Stones
sideman Nicky Hopkins to record
Jamming with Edward!. Cooder also played slide guitar for the 1970 film soundtrack
Performance, which contained Jagger's first solo single, "
Memo from Turner". The 1975
compilation album Metamorphosis features an uncredited Cooder contribution to Bill Wyman's "Downtown Suzie". Cooder also collaborated with
Lowell George of
Little Feat, playing
bottleneck guitar on the original version of "
Willin'". He also played bottleneck guitar and mandolin on two tracks on the Gordon Lightfoot album
Sit Down Young Stranger (later re-titled
If You Could Read My Mind), recorded in late 1969 and released in early 1970.
1970s Throughout the 1970s, Cooder released a series of
Warner Bros. Records albums that showcased his guitar work, initially on the
Reprise Records label, before being reassigned to the main Warners label along with many of Reprise's artists when the company retired the imprint. Cooder explored bygone musical
genres and found old-time recordings which he then personalized and updated. Thus, on his breakthrough album,
Into the Purple Valley, he chose unusual instrumentations and arrangements of blues, gospel,
calypso, and country songs (giving a tempo change to the cowboy ballad "Billy the Kid"). The album opened with the song "How Can You Keep on Moving (Unless You Migrate Too)" by
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham about the
Okies who were not welcomed when they migrated west to escape the
Dust Bowl in the 1930s – to which Cooder gave a rousing-yet-satirical march accompaniment. In 1970 he collaborated with Ron Nagle and performed on his
Bad Rice album released on Warner Brothers. His later 1970s albums (with the exception of
Jazz, which explored ragtime/vaudeville) do not fall under a single genre description, but his self-titled first album could be described as blues;
Into the Purple Valley, ''
Boomer's Story, and Paradise and Lunch as folk and blues; Chicken Skin Music and Showtime
as a mix of Tex-Mex and Hawaiian; Bop Till You Drop as 1950s R&B; and Borderline and Get Rhythm
as rock-based. His 1979 album Bop Till You Drop'' was the first
popular music album released that was
recorded digitally, using the early 3M digital mastering recorder. It yielded his biggest
hit, an R&B
cover version of
Elvis Presley's 1960s recording "
Little Sister". Cooder is credited on
Van Morrison's 1979 album
Into the Music, for slide guitar on the song "
Full Force Gale". He also played guitar on
Judy Collins' 1970 concert tour, and is featured on
Living, the 1971 live album recorded during that tour. He also learned from and performed with
Gabby Pahinui and
"Atta" Isaacs in Hawaii during the
Hawaiian Renaissance of the early 1970s. He is also credited for guitars on several 1971 recordings by
Nancy Sinatra that were produced by Andy Wickman and Lenny Waronker – "Is Anybody Goin' To San Antone", "Hook & Ladder", and "Glory Road". Cooder is credited as a mandolin player on Gordon Lightfoot's
Don Quixote album in 1972.
1980s Cooder has worked as a studio musician and has also scored many
film soundtracks including the
Wim Wenders film
Paris, Texas (1984). Cooder based this soundtrack and title song "Paris, Texas" on
Blind Willie Johnson's "
Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)", which he described as "the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music". Musician
Dave Grohl has declared Cooder's score for
Paris, Texas one of his favorite albums. In 2018 Cooder told
BBC Radio 4 listeners: "[Wenders] did a very good job at capturing the ambiance out there in the desert, just letting the microphones and the
nagra machine roll and get tones and sound from the desert itself, which I discovered was
E♭, was in the key of E♭ – that's the wind, you know, was nice. So we tuned everything to E♭." "Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)" was also the basis for Cooder's song "Powis Square" for the movie
Performance. His other film work includes
Walter Hill's
The Long Riders (1980),
Southern Comfort (1981),
Streets of Fire (1984), ''
Brewster's Millions (1985), Johnny Handsome, Last Man Standing'' (1996), Hill's
Trespass (1992) and
Mike Nichols'
Primary Colors (1998). Cooder, along with
Arlen Roth, dubbed all slide and regular blues guitar parts in the 1986 film
Crossroads, a take on blues legend
Robert Johnson. In 1988, Cooder produced the album by his longtime backing vocalists
Bobby King and
Terry Evans on
Rounder Records titled
Live and Let Live. He contributed his slide guitar work to every track. He also plays extensively on their 1990 self-produced Rounder release
Rhythm, Blues, Soul & Grooves. Cooder's music also appeared on two episodes of the television program
Tales From the Crypt: "The Man Who Was Death" and "The Thing From the Grave". In 1984, Cooder played on two songs on the debut album by Carla Olson & the Textones,
Midnight Mission – "Carla's Number One is to Survive" and the previously unreleased
Bob Dylan song "Clean Cut Kid". Shortly thereafter he was writing and recording the music for the film
Blue City and asked the band to appear in the film performing. (He took them to the studio and produced "You Can Run" which he also played on.) In 1985, Cooder was a guest artist on the song "Rough Edges" from
Kim Carnes' album
Barking at Airplanes. Kim named her son Ry as a tribute to Ry Cooder. Also in 1988, Cooder produced and featured in the
Les Blank-directed concert documentary film ''Ry Cooder & The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces: Let's Have a Ball
where he plays in collaboration with a selection of musicians famous in their various musical fields. The following year, he played a janitor in the Jim Henson series The Ghost of Faffner Hall'', in the episode "Music Is More Than Technique".
1990s In the early 1990s, Cooder collaborated on two
world music "crossover" albums, which blended the traditional American musical genres that Cooder has championed throughout his career with the contemporary improvised music of India and Africa. For
A Meeting by the River (1993), which also featured his son
Joachim Cooder on percussion, he teamed with
Hindustani classical musician
V.M. Bhatt, a virtuoso of the
Mohan Veena (a modified 20-string
archtop guitar of Bhatt's own invention) and Sukhvinder Singh Namdhari also known as Pinky Tabla Player. In 1993 he teamed up with multi-instrumentalist
Ali Farka Touré from
Mali to record the album
Talking Timbuktu, which he also produced. The album, released in 1994, also featured longtime Cooder collaborator
Jim Keltner on drums, veteran blues guitarist
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, jazz bassist
John Patitucci and African percussionists and musicians including
Hamma Sankare and Oumar Toure. Both albums won the
Grammy Award for
Best World Music Album in 1994 and 1995 respectively. Cooder also worked with
Tuvan throat singers for the score to the 1993 film
Geronimo: An American Legend. In 1995 he performed in
The Wizard of Oz in Concert: Dreams Come True, a musical performance of the popular story at the
Lincoln Center in New York to benefit the
Children's Defense Fund. The performance was originally broadcast on both TBS and TNT. It was issued on CD and video in 1996. In the late 1990s Cooder played a significant role in the increased appreciation of traditional
Cuban music, due to his collaboration as producer of the
Buena Vista Social Club (1997) recording, which became a worldwide hit and revived the careers of some of the greatest surviving exponents of 20th century Cuban music.
Wim Wenders, who had previously directed 1984's
Paris, Texas, directed a documentary film of the musicians involved,
Buena Vista Social Club (1999), which was nominated for an
Academy Award in 2000. The enterprise cost him a $25,000 fine for violating the
United States embargo against Cuba.
2000s Cooder's 2005 album
Chávez Ravine was touted by his
record label as being "a post-World War II-era American narrative of 'cool cats', radios, UFO sightings, J. Edgar Hoover, red scares, and baseball". The record is a tribute to the long-gone Los Angeles Latino enclave known as
Chávez Ravine. Using real and imagined historical characters, Cooder and friends created an album that recollects various aspects of the poor but vibrant hillside
Chicano community that no longer exists. Cooder says, "Here is some music for a place you don't know, up a road you don't go. Chávez Ravine, where the sidewalk ends." of the first half of the American twentieth century, and even has a song featuring executed unionist
Joe Hill.
My Name Is Buddy was accompanied by a booklet featuring a story and illustration (by
Vincent Valdez) for each track, providing additional context to Buddy's adventures. Cooder produced and performed on an album for
Mavis Staples entitled ''
We'll Never Turn Back'', which was released on April 24, 2007. The
concept album focused on
Gospel songs of the
civil rights movement and also included two new original songs by Cooder. Cooder's album
I, Flathead was released on June 24, 2008. It is the completion of his California trilogy. Based on the
drag racing culture of the early 1960s, the album is set on the desert salt flats in southern California. The disc was also released as a deluxe edition with stories written by Cooder to accompany the music. In late 2009, Cooder toured Japan, New Zealand, and Australia with
Nick Lowe, performing some of Lowe's songs and a selection of Cooder's own material, mainly from the 1970s. Joaquim Cooder (Ry's son) provided percussion, and
Juliette Commagere and
Alex Lilly contributed backing vocals. The song "Diaraby", which Cooder recorded with
Ali Farka Touré, is used as the theme to ''
The World's
Geo Quiz. The World'' is a radio show distributed by
Public Radio International. In 2009, Cooder performed in
The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian
Howard Zinn's ''
A People's History of the United States. Cooder performed with Bob Dylan and Van Dyke Parks on the documentary broadcast on December 13, 2009, on the History Channel. They played "Do Re Mi" and reportedly a couple of other Guthrie songs that were excluded from the final edit. He also traveled with the band Los Tigres del Norte and recorded the 2010 album San Patricio'' with the Chieftains,
Lila Downs,
Liam Neeson,
Linda Ronstadt,
Van Dyke Parks,
Los Cenzontles, and Los Tigres.
2010s in August 2015 In June 2010, responding to the passage of
Arizona SB 1070, he released the single "Quicksand", which tells the story of Mexicans attempting to emigrate to Arizona through the desert. Cooder's critically acclaimed The album was composed in support of the
Democratic Party and President
Barack Obama in the 2012 election. On September 10, 2013, Cooder released
Live in San Francisco, featuring the Corridos Famosos band, including
Joachim Cooder on drums;
Robert Francis on bass; vocalists Terry Evans,
Arnold McCuller, and
Juliette Commagere;
Flaco Jiménez on accordion; and the Mexican brass band La Banda Juvenil. The album was recorded during a two-night run at
Great American Music Hall in
San Francisco, August 31 and September 1, 2011. It is Cooder's first official live recording since
Show Time in 1977 (which had also been recorded at Great American Music Hall). In 2015, Cooder toured with
Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White and other members of
the Whites with their "Music for The Good People" show. The tour continued through into 2016. On May 11, 2018, Cooder released his first solo album in six years entitled
The Prodigal Son. The subsequent tour featured opening performances by his son, Joachim, who also accompanied Cooder on drums. In 2019, he toured with
Rosanne Cash on a brief tour as a tribute to Johnny Cash called "Cooder and Cash on Cash".
2020s On April 22, 2022, Cooder and Taj Mahal released
Get on Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.{{cite web ==Awards==