Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder, born in Los Angeles in 1947, is the kind of guitarist other guitarists go quiet around. Slide is his calling card, bottleneck lines that sound like they've been soaking in river water for a century, but he'll pick up a mandolin just as easily, and his real obsession is old music: blues, folk, the roots stuff most of his peers left behind once the amps got louder.

He played in the Rising Sons and has worked alongside Captain Beefheart, Taj Mahal, John Lee Hooker, the Rolling Stones, Randy Newman, Little Feat, Neil Young and a long list of others, while making his own records for Warner Bros. "The Dark End of the Street" is pure Cooder: slow, spare and aching, a soul song played like a back-porch confession.

The travels never stopped. He formed Little Village in 1991, and in 1997 he produced Buena Vista Social Club with traditional Cuban musicians, a record that turned into a hit around the world and got its own Wim Wenders documentary. The Americana crowd handed him a Lifetime Achievement Award for instrumentalists in 2007, and in 2011 he tried a different kind of storytelling altogether with a book of short stories, Los Angeles Stories.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.