Ry Cooder, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down

Ry Cooder

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down

(Nonesuch ****)

nolead ends Having completed his brilliant trilogy about a bygone Southern California with 2008's I, Flathead, Ry Cooder now turns his attention to 21st-century America. And it's not a pretty picture. As the legendary outlaw puts it from his perch in heaven in "El Corrido de Jesse James": "There's goings-on man can't stand no more."

Cooder takes deadly aim at rapacious bankers, warmongers, land barons, and the like, showing the devastating impact of their actions on ordinary folk. He does this in a manner that mixes the scrappy populism of Woody Guthrie with the first-person narratives of Springsteen in Steinbeckian Ghost of Tom Joad mode. So, amid angry jabs like "No Banker Left Behind" and "Christmas Time This Year" are wrenchingly poignant tales like "Quick Sand" and "Baby Joined the Army." All of it is set to an incredibly rich melting pot of folk, blues, country, rock, and norteno.

As the title hints, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down is not without its mordant humor. And flat-out hilarious is "John Lee Hooker for President," in which Cooder adopts the laconic tone of the late blues great. Amid wanting "nine fine-lookin' womens on the Supreme Court," he makes a campaign pledge that's hard to resist: "All you backbiters and syndicators, hear what I say . . . I ain't gonna stand for no trash-talkin' or double- dealin'. And there's one point I really want to prove. If you vote for John Lee Hooker, you know you gonna groove."

- Nick Cristiano