But Brownie, he laid it down.” Cooder adds: “This thing of squeezing the thumb and first finger and a little bit of the second finger, which I still do. To really play behind the harp like that. He describes McGhee as a “solid rhythm player.
“You got the south on steroids, when you got the music of the south, the culture of the south, the beauty of the south, through Brownie and Sonny,” Taj Mahal says. They were named National Heritage Fellows in 1982 in recognition of their distinctive musical contributions and accomplishments. As a new generation emerging in the 1960’s drew inspiration from folk and blues, Terry and McGhee toured the world as the foremost exponents of the acoustic music of the Piedmont. Terry and McGhee traveled in the same circles as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, and Josh White, among others in a rich mix of writers, actors and musicians. Their Piedmont blues style became popular during the folk music revival of the 1940s and ’50s, centered in New York City’s flourishing club scene for jazz, boogie-woogie, blues and folk music. But they were best known for their forty-five-year partnership, which began in 1939 and included mesmerizing live performances around the world and numerous acclaimed recordings. Harmonica player Sonny Terry and guitarist Brownie McGhee, both originally from the southeastern United States, had active solo careers as well as collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of their time.
GET ON BOARD is Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder’s first recording together since then. Cooder then played on Taj Mahal’s 1968 self-titled solo debut album. The 1960s recording sessions, widely bootlegged, were finally issued officially in 1992. The band was signed to Columbia Records but an album was not released and the group disbanded a year later. Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder originally joined forces in 1965, forming The Rising Sons when Cooder was just seventeen. 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. 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. But that first record, Get on Board, the 10” on Folkways, was so wonderful, I could understand the guitar playing.” What do you do, fourteen, eighteen years old? I was trapped. ‘I have got to get out of here,’ was all I could think. With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo-joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass-the duo recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee, who they both first heard as teenagers in California.Įxplaining where Terry and McGhee took him musically, Cooder says, “Down the road, away from Santa Monica. A video for the track “Hooray Hooray” may be seen below, as well as an interview with Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal about the record. Nearly sixty years after they first played together, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, longtime friends and collaborators, reunite with an album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives: GET ON BOARD: THE SONGS OF SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE, out April 22, 2022, on Nonesuch Records.
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