“All my music still comes from my subconscious, without any intention” | Joachim Cooder interview

Joachim Cooder was a small child when he first heard the music of the banjo player Uncle Dave Macon. His dad used to play Macon’s ‘Morning Blues’ around the house, adding a Tennessee twang to lines like, ‘I got the morning blues, oh so bad / Honey come and kiss me, they’re the worst I’ve ever had,’ putting some welly into his banjo strumming, and country music ideas into his only child’s head.

“Years later he was playing the very same Uncle Dave tune to my kids,” says Cooder, 42, of his father Ry – the slide guitarist and musician of Buena Vista Social Club and Paris, Texas soundtrack fame. “I saw how much they loved it and thought, ‘Well shoot, I’ll start using it in my show.’ People would always ask me what it was, so I began repurposing other Uncle Dave songs for a new audience… changing the lyrics, making the music more contemplative by slowing it down, playing melodies on my electric mbira.”

Why not? While Cooder has been an in-demand drummer and percussionist for over 20 years, featuring on albums from 1997’s Buena Vista Social Club to 2015’s In the Heart of Moon by Toumani Diabaté & Ali Farka Touré to Ry Cooder’s 2018 release Prodigal Son, the mbira is his instrument of choice.

His solo work with a band that includes fiddle player Rayna Gellert, bassist Sam Gendel and singer Juliette Commagere (his wife) on backing vocals sets the plinks and pedal-looped grooves of his modified thumb piano (whose electric pick-ups mean it can be plugged in, amplified and adjusted with effects) alongside folk, ambient and global music. The resulting soundworld has a textured but soothing timelessness that counters the harshness of lives lived in its old lyrics.

“I’m no purist,” says Cooder, sitting on his hacienda-style porch at home in Altadena, California, overlooking what might be an unchlorinated swimming pool next to palm trees, which rear into a cloudless blue sky. “The mbira is a very evocative modal instrument. You can slide into something that feels like African desert blues or the Celtic harp songs I grew up listening to and taught myself to play.”

Cooder’s Over That Road I’m Bound, his third solo album, cherry-picks tracks from the 200-strong repertoire of Macon (1870-1952), the first superstar of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry show. Cooder didn’t know much about the banjo-wielding showman nicknamed ‘The Dixie Dewdrop’ when he set out to record his songs, many of which being tunes that Macon had gathered from a range of the late 1800s forms – gospel, folk music, minstrel show and vaudeville – and reimagined for the ears of early 20th-century audiences.

He knows all about him now. “Uncle Dave was an Alan Lomax figure, a preserver of old-time music from a bygone era, of an oral tradition passed down through generations,” says Cooder in his soft-spoken way. “My dad knew of him through Pete Seeger, who was a big fan and even wrote liner notes for one of Uncle Dave’s albums.”

Not every song in Uncle Dave Macon’s repertoire would pass muster today. The likes of ‘Pickaninny Lullaby’, a song written by Tod B Galloway and published in 1897, have been jettisoned. Nonetheless, Macon was influential in helping preserve banjo-played songs whose African roots trace back to 17th-century slave ships; the banjo, too, is descended from West African lutes. Cooder’s so-called ‘array mbira’ – fashioned by San Diego inventor-instrument-maker Bill Wesley – arguably reinvests said song with an African flavour.

As indeed does his take on the hard-driving, country music vibing ‘Backwater Blues’, recorded by Macon (using his favoured two-fingered, open C tuning) with his musical partner, guitarist Sam McGee. Cooder’s version features the sinuous guitar lines of Mali’s Vieux Farka Touré – son of the Grammy-winning Ali.

“I was playing ‘Backwater Blues’ on mbira and thinking of In the Heart of the Moon, which for me is still one of the most beautiful albums ever recorded,” says Cooder, who likes to give the record out as a birthday gift to friends. “I thought, ‘We need to get Vieux to come and do his great thing on this,’ and he did.”

Such invisible silver threads lend further intimacy to a project that is very much a family affair: Dan Gellert, father of the aforementioned Rayna, guests on banjo and fiddle. Ry Cooder plays banjo, guitar, bass and sings backing vocals with Commagere, during sessions that included piano and pump organ, and a Turkish bow-necked lute called the yaylı tambur.

Joachim Cooder (photo: Abby Ross)

Sessions took their own good time: “We set up in my parents’ little outdoor studio in Santa Monica. My daughter Paloma [now five] was going to a pre-school up the Pacific Highway, so I’d drop her off and come back down, and my mom,” – photographer Susan Titelman, who took the iconic Buena Vista cover and sleeve photos – “would look after the baby [Mojave, now three].” A smile. “There was none of that feeling you get in a hired recording studio, where you’re aware the clock is ticking and money is being spent.”

“I’ve never been a late-night guy,” he adds. “I don’t do drugs and hang out. I like to go home and go to bed.” Or at least, be home in time to read – or create – a bedtime story for his kids, whose influence on his music is palpable. Cooder’s previous album Fuchsia Machu Picchu (2018), which marked his progression from instrumental player to lead singer and songwriter, was largely inspired by the absurdist observations and gems of wisdom uttered by the then toddler Paloma.

“She would give me these incredible song ideas by saying things in a way that I never would have thought of, or ideas would come out of the bedtime stories I’d create for her, like making the five coat hangers in her closet a pretend family.”

In the same way that Macon added his own lyrics to his recovered songs (‘My name is Uncle Dave, I’m from Tennessee / If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree,’ for example) so Cooder changes up the words in Macon’s repertoire, pasting in fragments from his own life and Paloma’s imagination. It helped that his daughter was as big an Uncle Dave fan as he was. “For a while we were listening to an Uncle Dave box set every morning. Paloma would insist on hearing certain songs, and became the unofficial director of this project.”

His daughter’s stamp is obvious on the singalong tune ‘Rabbit in the Pea Patch’ and, more abstractly, within the couplets of ‘Come Along Buddy’: ‘Steam train girl ridin’ up and down… Train car fillin’ up with dreams…’ sings Cooder in his honeyed, unhurried tenor. ‘Tiny bottles blue and green, laid out by your TV screen, been hearing your voice inside each one, I’m wonderin’ what it means…’ In a song variously inspired by a travelling pig in a children’s story, a day out riding steam trains in northern California and the glass bottle collection inherited from a friend after her death, what it means, says Cooder, is up to the listener. The random nature of such lyrics dovetail with Cooder’s preference for the experimental and the untutored – as was, well, drummed into him in childhood.

“At the age of four I was transfixed by my dad’s drummer, Jim Keltner. I’d climb into his drum kit and watch him play with his eyes closed, and when he’d open them he’d see this little face peering up,” he says. “Jim gave me a tiny drum set, which I would play along with my dad.”

“Mom and I would go along with my dad to wherever he was playing. I remember a regional festival outside Atlanta where there was a band with a drummer who’d come up with stuff on his own, playing what seemed like backwards and inside out, in a way completely removed from popular culture. That stuck with me. These people who are truly remote in their thinking and approach to music. It’s something we lose year by year.”

He’s proud to have played alongside African and Cuban musicians. “The real deal old school guys. They’re the same, no matter where they’re from. Somebody like Flaco Jiménez, the [Texan] accordion player is no different to Ibrahim Ferrer or Ali Farka Touré, in that they have the same feeling and understanding. They’re different, I know, but you know them.”

Over the years Cooder’s rhythmic toolkit came to include hand drums such as the Turkish dumbek, which he was given during Ry Cooder’s collaborations with the Los Angeles session instrumentalist David Lindley. But while Cooder also plays piano and keyboards, he can’t play guitar.

“Not a clue,” he says happily. “But you know, it was only once I had the mbira under my fingers that I was able to start singing and writing my own songs. All my music still comes from my subconscious, without any intention.”

“Taking Uncle Dave songs out of the banjo box took me to a very lullaby-ish state, and let me dream.”

Read the review of Over That Road I'm Bound in the Songlines Reviews Database 

This article originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today