Taj Mahal And Ry Cooder Reunite For First New Album In 57 YearsTaj Mahal And Ry Cooder Reunite For First New Album In 57 Years

Slide guitar virtuoso Ry Cooder and blues musician Taj Mahal started their careers together. They formed the Rising Sons and signed to Columbia in 1965 but disbanded a year later, and the group’s sole album didn’t end up seeing the light of day until 1992. But now, the two icons are reuniting after nearly 60 years to release the Piedmont blues covers album Get On Board: The Songs Of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, featuring Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo, Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano, and Joachim Cooder on drums and bass.

Cooder says that listening to Terry and McGhee as a teenager brought him “down the road, away from Santa Monica. Where everything was good. ‘I have got to get out of here,’ was all I could think. What do you do, fourteen, eighteen years old? I was trapped. But that first record, Get On Board, the 10″ on Folkways, was so wonderful, I could understand the guitar playing.” Taj Mahal adds, “I started hearing them when I was about nineteen, and I wanted to go to these coffee houses, ’cause I heard that these old guys were playing. I knew that there was a river out there somewhere that I could get into, and once I got in it, I’d be all right. They brought the whole package for me.”

“This thing of squeezing the thumb and first finger and a little bit of the second finger, which I still do. I’d forgotten where it came from. That’s what Brownie did. I saw him do that and said, ‘I think I can do that.’” … We’ve been doing this a while. Perhaps we’ve earned the right to bring it back,” Cooder says. “We’re now the guys that we aspired toward when we were starting out,” Taj Mahal agrees. “Here we are now … old timers. What a great opportunity, to really come full circle.” Listen to their rendition of “Hooray Hooray” below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “My Baby Done Changed The Lock On The Door”
02 “The Midnight Special”
03 “Hooray Hooray”
04 “Deep Sea Diver”
05 “Pick A Bale Of Cotton”
06 “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”
07 “What A Beautiful City”
08 “Pawn Shop Blues”
09 “Cornbread, Peas, Black Molasses”
10 “Packing Up Getting Ready To Go”
11 “I Shall Not Be Moved”

Get On Board: The Songs Of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee is out 4/22 on Nonesuch. Pre-order it here.