Ryland Peter Cooder (born March 15, 1947) is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.
Cooder's solo work draws upon many genres. He has played with John Lee Hooker, Captain Beefheart, Taj Mahal, Gordon Lightfoot, Ali Farka Touré, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Randy Newman, Linda Ronstadt, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, David Lindley, the Chieftains, Warren Zevon, Manuel Galbán, the Doobie Brothers, Little Feat, and Carla Olson and the Textones (on record and film). He formed the band Little Village in 1991. He produced the album Buena Vista Social Club (1997), featuring traditional musicians in Cuba, which became a worldwide hit. Wim Wenders directed the documentary film of the same name (1999), which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2000.
Cooder was ranked at No. 8 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time", while a 2010 list by Gibson Guitar Corporation placed him at No. 32. In 2011, he published a collection of short stories called Los Angeles Stories.
Ryland Peter Cooder was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 15, 1947, the son of Emma (née Casaroli) and Bill Cooder. His mother's family emigrated from Parma, Italy.
He was raised in Santa Monica, California, and graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1964. During the 1960s he briefly attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He began playing the guitar when he was three years old.
At the age of four, he accidentally stuck a knife in his left eye; he has been wearing a glass eye ever since.
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 10 ft (3.0 m) 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.
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. On September 12, 1970, Cooder was part of the backing band for the “Musical Tribute to Woody Guthrie” concert at the Hollywood Bowl, where he played bottleneck guitar and mandolin.
Cooder’s 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.
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".