Ry Cooder teams with Ricky Skaggs, the Whites for roots show

Legendary slide guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Ry Cooder has spent his career exploring unlikely collaborations. He’s worked with the Chieftains, Ali Farka Toure, and most famously the Buena Vista Social Club, but the announcement of his current tour with bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs, his wife, Sharon, and her revered country music family, the Whites, may come as a surprise to many – partly because the group isn’t promoting an album.

They’re having a blast playing songs over a half-century old and fulfilling a lifelong wish for Cooder, who grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., hearing gospel, bluegrass, honky tonk, Texas dance hall and Western swing on the radio. The all-star band plays McGlohon on Wednesday.

“He was immersed in that music before he was hearing blues and slide-guitar stuff,” explains Skaggs, adding that at the time, DJs catered to homesick transplants from Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas who moved to L.A. to work at an airplane factory.

“I had always thought, wouldn’t it be great to sing and play this music? In Santa Monica and West Los Angeles it was a dim prospect,” Cooder says. “The bluegrass craze in the early ’60s was like a comet coming through when everybody started being aware of this music on LP. I got a Mastertone banjo and sat there and played with the records. That I might have something to do with the music in a professional way never occurred to me.”

Decades later, watching Skaggs and the Whites on YouTube got Cooder thinking.

“I’m 68 years old. Am I ever going to get to do this? Am I going to go to my grave and never get the opportunity?” he recalls. If he was going to do it, he wanted to do it with Skaggs and the Whites. “They’re the best there is.”

Skaggs and Cooder guested on each other’s projects in recent years, but Skaggs didn’t realize how much his friend enjoyed sharing the studio or stage.

Rehearsing for a benefit show together, Cooder fell on the couch and grabbed his heart at the sound of the Whites’ harmonies. Later, Skaggs and his wife, Sharon White, got wind of an interview he did. The reporter had asked Cooder about his bucket list.

“Ry said, ‘I’d like to sing some stuff with Ricky and Sharon and maybe with the Whites,’” recalls Sharon White. “Not long after, we got an invitation from Rosanne Cash.”

Cash had invited Cooder to headline a series she was curating at Carnegie Hall in New York. He wanted Skaggs and the Whites on the bill. One show blossomed into a tour, but to hear Cooder tell it, he masterminded the whole thing.

“Ricky seemed like a friendly fella; I thought, ‘WelI, wonder if I can figure out some way to propose this,’” he remembers. “Little by little we got around him and did a few things with my son (Cooder’s drummer Joachim, who is also on the tour).”

Cooder recalls saying, “‘Here we are adding our little ingredient, our flavor in the pot. What do you think?’ The idea grew into something that suggested we should go out and perform this stuff.”

Cooder had one last request.

“Ry wanted my dad to be part of the show,” explains Sharon. That would be 84-year-old country music legend Buck White, whom Cooder calls the “Vladimir Horowitz of Texas dancehall piano.”

The elder White agreed and Sharon’s sister, Cheryl White, joined the tour as both his caretaker and harmony singer.

“His health is awesome. His memory is not. Having Cheryl keeps the confusion way down,” says White. “The music we’re doing isn’t giving him any problem at all. He knows all those songs. It’s his short-term memory he has the most trouble with.”

“He is playing us under the table every night,” echoes Skaggs. “You’ve heard of that ‘Bobby Flay Throwdown’ on TV? It’s like ‘Throwdown’ with Buck White.”

This story was originally published August 14, 2015 at 3:04 PM with the headline "Ry Cooder teams with Ricky Skaggs, the Whites for roots show."