Cooder: 'These things should be said . . . right now'

Ry Cooder's reputation is built on his virtuosity on slide guitar, along with a mastery of other guitar styles. (He's been in Rolling Stone's Top 10 guitarists of all time.) In addition, he's a musicologist par excellence who played with Taj Mahal as a teenager, taught Keith Richards the blues tuning he used to write many of the Rolling Stones' greatest songs, and put together the Cuban supergroup Buena Vista Social Club in 1996.

You don't think of Cooder principally as a socially conscious storyteller or protest singer. But of all the pop-culture figures chipping in to the political discourse this election season, Cooder is making the most artistically fruitful contribution with Election Special, his roots and blues album of impassioned, highly partisan, and often extremely funny original songs.

The album is full of amusing and pointed character sketches such as "Goin' to Tampa," about a G.O.P. delegate who, Cooder says, "is hoping to meet Sarah Palin by the ice machine," and "Cold, Cold Feeling" a bottleneck blues sung in the voice of a lonely Barack Obama isolated in the White House.

The chuckle-inducing attention-grabber, however, is "Mutt Romney Blues," a song sung from the point of view of a dog riding on top of Republican candidate Mitt Romney's car. "Tied me down, up, up on the roof," the 65-year-old Cooder sings, with his son and musical partner Joachim on drums. "Boss, I hollered: 'Woof, woof, woof!' "

"It's a blues statement," Cooder says, talking by phone from his home in Santa Monica, Calif. The dog is "like a yard man, a put-upon servant . . . . I thought, I don't see anybody writing songs about the dog, so I think I had better do it."

Election Special is the fifth in a remarkable run of solo albums for Cooder that began with 2005's Chavez Ravine, a concept album about the destruction of a Mexican American community in Los Angeles in the 1950s, in the area where Dodger Stadium was built.

With that story, Cooder found his groove. "I like that pachuco music very much, it's very evocative for me. And that really got me focused on telling stories, people stories, issue stories," Cooder says of the approach that carried over to 2007's anthropomorphic, pro-union folk collection My Name Is Buddy and last year's stunning Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down.

An early reviver of angry Woody Guthrie songs like "Do Re Mi" and "Vigilante Man" on his early 1970s solo albums, Cooder is taking part in a Woody Guthrie centenary concert Sunday at the Kennedy Center, in Washington. But he's also been an adventurous musical explorer. He's at work on an old-time country album with Petra, Tanya, and Rachel Haden (known as the Haden Triplets), and on a compilation of Japanese kawachi ondo music to benefit victims of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

But with Pull Up Some Dust and Election Special, Cooder has focused on using the blues and folk idioms he's spent a lifetime mastering to get across his political point of view.

"There is this feeling of urgency with the last two records," he says. "They had a purpose in mind. These things should be said and they should be said right now. And I'm going to say them as I see them."