Quote:
Originally Posted by lieasleep
did you hear the stuff tha try cooder did with ali farka toure? soooooooo good.
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Ali Farka Toure's music was hypnotic. It was like listening to John Lee Hooker jam with an African musican ensemble.
Ry Cooder is a one man folk revival. The only reason I ever got exposed to the music of Blind Blake, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie McTell and Furry Lewis was the tireless efforts of young blues enthusiasts like Ry Cooder, John Fahey and Blind Al Wilson to promote the great blues of the 1920s and 1930s which were largely unheard by the American public in the 1970s.
John Fahey used to go door to door in Mississippi looking for old 78 rpm blues records and trying to locate old blues musicians who made those unheard records. In the process Fahey rediscovered Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House and a dozen or so other blues musicians of great significance to the American folkways.
The only reason I learned how to do ragtime fingerpicking and play open tuned bottleneck guitar was that Ry Cooder's first three albums blew me away. I didn't even know that delta blues existed prior to that and that's the way I wanted to play guitar. The first real country blues album I ever heard was Taj Mahal's debut on Columbia Records and Ry Cooder's amazing bottleneck guitar was on most of the cuts.
Intrestingly enough Taj Mahal was from Springfield Massachusetts and attended University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In the Seventies I was working as a Vista volunteer in Springfield and ran into Taj Mahal's mother at a community meeting. She lived in a middle class black neighborhood called the Upper Hill in Springfield. At first I though she was putting me on, but I checked Taj's biography and found out he was indeed from Springfield. From listening to his music I thought Taj Mahal grew in a sharecropper's shack in Mississippi.