Photograph: Robert Knight Archive/Redferns/Getty.

You need not be a fan of his guitar style, which is unique; nor his producer credentials, which are significant. You do not even have to like the Rolling Stones to appreciate the following:

(It is worth noting, perhaps, that before Keith Richards encountered Cooder, he was essentially a strummer. After their encounters, during which, Richards has written, he took Cooder for all he was worth, the modern Rolling Stones, with the two guitars attempting to manage rhythmically and harmonically what Cooder accomplished with one, were born.)

You merely need to know who the Rolling Stones are to appreciate that one man’s collaboration can lead to such an impact on popular culture. But that was a long time ago, and the influences have grown wider and deeper:

He is perhaps best known for finding, hiring, rehearsing, selecting the repertoire for, accompanying, and recording a group of elderly Cuban men and one woman as an outfit that he called the Buena Vista Social Club. Their album was the most successful world-music record ever. The band itself was a kind of novelist’s creation. It didn’t exist before Cooder arrived in Cuba and dreamed it up on the spot—he had gone to Cuba to make a record with some African guitarists who encountered immigration difficulties and never arrived—and it didn’t exist after he left. His appearances with them, at Carnegie Hall and in Amsterdam, which were the basis for the movie, were two of the only times he left the house in those years for a gig. Out of respect and an aversion to self-inflation, and also in order for the other musicians to shine, he played with them discreetly, sitting in the back, beside the drummer, who is his son, Joachim, which led a generation of listeners to think of Cooder as a record producer and not know that he was mainly a master guitarist…

Thanks to Alex Wilkinson for bringing this to our attention and even more so to Ry Cooder for getting back on the horse… Read the whole post here.