Ry Cooder on beginnings . . . . Nenad Georgievski / All About Jazz | Don’s Tunes

 

Ry Cooder: "When I was a very young, little kid, and I was 8 or 9 years old, and I first heard these records, Sonny Terry and Brown McGhee on record and I had a guitar and I learned to play some. I could play simple music but when you are very young and you hear something like that for the first time it has a huge impact on a young person. So then you think, this is a life you can have. You learn to do this and I wanted to learn to do it. One of the first blues that I heard was Brownie and Sonny. And then I went to look for other records, of course. It wasn't so easy back then. There weren't that many records of early blues and later there were more, but it was the two of them that I heard first and this particular Get on Board record (Folkways Records, 1952), was the first one of theirs that I had. 

By the time I was 13 they had started to come to Los Angeles and there was a folk club out here that started in the early '60s and so I went to see them, absolutely. And that was a huge thing too because with the records you know what they play like but seeing them do it is a whole other story. Then you can watch and feel it and then understand a little more. It was a tremendous thing. That kind of experience, you can't have it anymore. It's not possible. Most everybody has gone, are dead or whatever, but back then, a lot of these guys were not that old. Country music and blues in the '60s was an interesting thing and in those days you could see people, living people that you have records of."

By Nenad Georgievski / All About Jazz
Photo: Courtesy to Abby Ros

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