Ry Cooder is one of those guys that have been at the edge of the music business for decades. He has put out some incredible music. Get Rhythm is a masterwork of just snappy roots rock sensibility.
When I first got to college I bought Paradise and lunch. It had some great songs and it got played again and again. Nobody who I knew understood it. They were listening to Kiss and Styx and Thin Lizzy. No knock on those bands because he along with Bob Seger’s Live Bullet they were the soundtrack of hundred beer soaked Saturday nights. Still occasionally I would run across somebody playing Ry Cooder at a party or somewhere else and their tastes would be way cool. I found myself getting introduced to a ton of great music because once you started talking about Ry Cooder, next this up was Little Feat or maybe Captain Beefheart.
Anyway back to Get Rhythm, the album’s closing number is a heart wrenching ballad called Across the Borderline. I haven’t lived on the southern border of this country. I haven’t experienced the pain both sides in the immigration debate feel. However like a number of Bruce Springsteen’s songs and Dave Alvin’s California Snow this song conveys the heartache that the illegal migration to El Norte carries with it.
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