Ry Cooder's parable of "radical imagination," My Name is Buddy, will be released in on March 6, 2007 by Nonesuch / Perro Verde Records. The new album details the life, rambles, and political education of Buddy Red Cat, and finds Cooder in the company of such musicians as old time banjo legend Mike Seeger, his brother Pete, Roland White, Van Dyke Parks, Paddy Moloney, Flaco Jiminez, Stefon Harris, Joachim Cooder, and others. Each of the new album's seventeen songs, most written by Cooder, is accompanied by a story/vignette written by Cooder and a drawing by noted artist Vincent Valdez.

Scholar, author and activist William Ayers recently wrote: "Ry Cooder, a tireless troubadour for democracy, is at it again---crossing borders, making the strange surprisingly familiar and the familiar suddenly strange, clarifying and complicating the world in the same gesture. As always, he urges us to choose education over ignorance, participation and inclusion and solidarity over isolation. Ry Cooder's indispensable weapon is the most powerful ever mustered: a sublime and generous radical imagination.

Each of us has a bit of Ry Cooder's Buddy Red Cat in us---leaving the comfort and isolation of home, Buddy's eyes 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."

My Name is Buddy follows Ry Cooder's 2005 Grammy-nominated Chavez Ravine, a remembrance of a vanished neighborhood in Los Angeles.