Ry Cooder once likened his playing - a sublime amalgam of American folk and blues, Hawaiian slack-key guitar, the Tex-Mex zest of conjunto and the regal sensuality of Afro-Cuban son - as "some kind of steam device gone out of control.
Some of the first records Ry Cooder heard and loved as a child were Woody Guthrie's songs about working-class people in the Great Depression. He never quite got them out of his system. There has been a strain of social commentary in his albums, going back to his solo debut, when he covered Guthrie's "Do Re Mi" and Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?"