My Name Is Buddy

Detailing the life, rambles, and political education of Buddy Red Cat, Ry Cooder has enlisted help from legendary friends and musicians such as banjo master Mike Seeger, his brother Pete, Roland White, Van Dyke Parks, Paddy Maloney, Flaco Jiminez, Stefon Harris, and Joachim Cooder.

'My Name Is Buddy' features seventeen brand new songs, and each one is accompanied by a story/vignette written by Cooder and also a drawing by noted artist Vincent Valdez.

The album is also a journey, a phantasmagorical rendering in music, words and pictures of the travels of three unlikely cohorts - Buddy Red Cat, Lefty Mouse and Reverend Tom Toad - as they meander through the west "in the days of labor, big bosses, farm failures, strikes, company cops, sundown towns, hobos and trains, the America of yesteryear." For this allegorical tale, Cooder marshals all his remarkable skills as a producer, arranger, songwriter, soundtrack composer and musicologist.

Buddy Red Cat's eyes, according to Cooder, "are opened to a roiling world of trouble, a place of unnecessary pain and undeserved suffering, but a site as well of remarkable resilience and resistance. His journey affords him the opportunity to find out what kind of a cat he really is, and what kind of cat he wants to become."