First Listen: Ry Cooder, 'The Prodigal Son'

From the beginning of his career as a recording artist, Ry Cooder has treated the music of the past as a resource, turning to old (and very, very old) songs for guidance, mentorship, life lessons, spiritual advice.

When the guitarist and songwriter was beginning to develop his sound in the early 1970s, the British rockers were all copping the. In 1974, when the U.S. was in upheaval over Watergate and President Richard Nixon's secret phone taping, Cooder reworked an old spiritual, "Jesus on the Main Line," to speak, elegantly, to the crisis of lapsed morality and the promise of redemption. In the 1980s, after encountering a crew of long-unemployed Cuban singers and musicians, he excavated the romantic, idealistic songs they sang in the pre-Castro years to unlock a joy that had been missing from the world for decades.