![]() My Name Is Buddy: Another Record by Ry Cooder is, in a certain respect, Ry Cooder circling back, revisiting a body of music that has for much of his life held a certain fascination. "I’m a red cat till I die.” Soon enough, the itinerant Buddy had a back-story some fellow travelers he meets along the road-Lefty the Mouse, the Reverend Tom Toad-a past and a future a story to tell. “He’s a red cat-not just red colored, but he’s a union man. “I kept thinking ‘red cat,' and I kept hearing an old Charlie Poole song-a cadence.” It began to slide together. Propulsive rhythms and hardscrabble stories and scraps of ocher-toned melodies began to spin round inside. “Over time something was coming to me,” he says. But the notion had already crawled up inside somewhere deep in his imagination. After some initial poking around to learn this red cat’s name (“Buddy”) and a bit of his vagabond story (he was found in the alley behind a record store in Vancouver, living in a suitcase, and he’d passed away in 2005), he pushed it aside to tie up pressing loose ends. He found little else, except a web address and this note: “You’ll know what to do with this.”īut not right away. Yet, photo-shopped in place of his face was that of a red cat an inscrutable, seen-it-all expression hovering in his eyes. Inside, he found a familiar image of the great bluesman, Leadbelly. It arrived by way of US Mail, slipped into a nondescript, manila envelope, addressed in an old friend’s recognizable scrawl. In 2005, as Ry Cooder was knee-deep in some ninth-inning tinkering, finishing up his forthcoming album, Chavez Ravine, a peculiar message sailed in-one could say-from deep out-of-left-field.
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