Ry Cooder - Into The Purple Valley CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

the inside cover, worn over a ritzy Aloha barf shirt (vintage 1935) that's open at the neck and which is set off by a pair of properly scuffed 1938 Miami Floaters (which brings to mind all the superstitions and taboos about wearing dead men's shoes). All this and he's still standing in front of an incredible Commie-yellow 1939 Buick convertible with one flat white-wall and his arm around a smiling sylph whose lips are parted as if in invitation to who-knows-what? Very plucky.

Inside we find a good record which, like its marvelously overstated jacket, is terribly reminiscent of the bad old days, the Thirties. "How Can You Keep On Moving (Unless You Migrate Too)" is a traditional Depression Era ditty of uncertain parentage that, like the other traditional songs on this album, Cooder has adapted for a slide guitar and small rock and roll group arrangement. The songs on this album that come to us from the Depression all seem very timely in the context of 1972, which is pretty funny because one would have thought we'd be through with all that bullshit by now but, fakeout on us, we're not, and Ry has had the sense to show how music and words that were written 40 years ago still apply to the ridiculously awful conditions with which people are forced to live. "Billy The Kid" is also a traditional though apolitical number that gives Ry a chance to show off some handsome plucking of the mandolin and also the fine small band that was assembled for this record–Jim Keltner and Milt Holland on percussion, producer Jim Dickinson on piano, and Chris Ethridge on bass.

"Money Honey" is an old Jesse Stone number that is the rocker of this album; Ry gets off some incredibly beautiful slide guitar licks that show the source of his reputation as a legendary sideman. The song has a funky stop-time beat and a throaty chorus, and if there's a single on this LP, voila. What follows is a hilarious morsel of calypso pre-reggae nonsense called "F.D.R. in Trinidad" which is about Roosevelt's visit to the Land of the Hummingbird in 1943, and which is probably the only song ever written whose words explicitly mention Cordell Hull. What a treat! Washington Phillips' immortal and touching "Denomination Blues" rounds out the side with Jim Dickinson doing a nice job on ce