California is the garden of edenIt’s a paradise to live in or seeBut believe it or notYou won’t find it so hotIf you ain’t got the do re mi
Guitar player extraordinaire Ry Cooder… everything he plays has feeling and soul. This song just rolls and doesn’t skip a beat. I want to thank Clive for bringing Ry Cooder up a month or so ago, before I posted another Cooder song. I usually don’t post songs by the same artist so close together, but I made an exception in this case.
Cooder is an excellent musician and one of the great slide players of our time. He contributed to the Rolling Stones’ albums Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers and was briefly considered as a replacement for Brian Jones. Some say he wrote the riff to “Honky Tonk Woman.”
The song was written by Woody Guthrie as a warning to the Okie dreamers heading west during the Great Depression. It’s a cautionary folk tale wrapped in wit. But when Ry Cooder tackles it on his 1970 self-titled debut album, he swaps Woody’s acoustic for a blues groove that you won’t forget.
I’ve talked about guitar tone here before, and this is great. It moans. It sings. It talks back. He plays like he’s got some blues legends in his hand. Each lick feels like it was pulled straight from the dirt.
What makes Cooder’s take so great isn’t just the craftsmanship, it’s the context. Coming out in 1970, on the heels of the Nixon unease and the Vietnam burnout, Ry drags this Depression-era ballad into a new kind of storm.
Do Re Mi
Lots of folks back east they sayLeaving home most every dayBeating the hot old dusty wayTo the California line
Across the desert sands they rollGetting out of that old dust bowlThink they’re coming to a sugar bowlBut here’s what they find
Police at the port of entry sayYou’re number fourteen thousand for today
Hey, if you ain’t got the do re mi, boyIf you ain’t got the do re miWell, you better go back to beautiful TexasOklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee
California is the garden of edenIt’s a paradise to live in or seeBut believe it or notYou won’t find it so hotIf you ain’t got the do re mi
You want to buy a home or a farmThat can’t do nobody harmTake your vacation by mountains or seaDon’t swap your old cow for a carYou better stay right where you areBetter take this little tip from me
Well, I look through the want ads every dayThe headlines in the papers always say
Hey, if you ain’t got the do re mi, boyIf you ain’t got the do re mi…
California is the garden of edenIt’s a paradise to live in or seeBut believe it or notYou won’t find it so hotIf you ain’t got the do re mi
PowerPop... An Eclectic Collection of Pop Culture 