Ruben Gonzalez, who was buried last week in Havana, was the second to die this year of the vintage Cuban musicians who played on the Grammy-winning album called the 'Buena Vista Social Club'.

Gonzalez was the pianist, and he was 84. Compay Segundo, the lead vocalist, popular songwriter and inventor of the arm?nico, a guitar-like instrument with seven strings, was 95 when he died in July.

They were characters in one of the most satisfying everybody-lives-happily-ever-after (in a manner of speaking, of course) stories of the 20th Century. In the mid-1990s, they were over-the-hill musicians in Cuba who had difficulty finding work. Then, without warning, an American musician called Ry Cooder dropped into their lives and persuaded them to play on an album of Cuban music that made them rich and famous.

Cooder travelled to Cuba looking for a recording project. On a note in his pocket, he had the names of Compay (that's short for compadre, or friend) Segundo and Ruben Gonzalez. When he got in touch with them, they introduced him to others in the little-known world of Cuban music. It was some tie-up. The 'Buena Vista Social Club' was an instant, tremendous hit when it was published in 1997, and has sold eight million copies since. It called attention to Cuban music then little known outside Cuba. It introduced some wonderfully talented musicians to a world that knew nothing of their existence. And it turned the last years of the lives of a group of fairly elderly musicians into a real-life fairy tale.

So who is this Ry Cooder? He is a guitarist who started his career as a session man for artists as disparate as Taj Mahal and Captain Beefheart (he plays on the recently reissued 1967 album 'Safe As Milk'), for Randy Newman (on his classic '12 Songs', among others), and the Rolling Stones (on 'Let It Bleed', 'Sticky Fingers', and 'Beggars Banquet'). In the '80s, he branched out into soundtrack work, often composing for director Wim Wenders, though he also found time to help re-energise his singer friend John Hiatt. His scoring of the Wenders film 'Paris, Texas' is almost as well known as Ennio Morricone's themes for the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, like 'A Fistful of Dollars' and 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'.

During the '90s, Cooder spent a lot of time collaborating with a diverse stable of international musicians: His duets with V.M. Bhatt (1993's 'A Meeting By The River'), Ali Farka Toure (1994's 'Talking Timbuktu'), the successful 'Buena Vista Social Club', of course, and others since then have won him, and the musicians with whom he has worked, numerous accolades and awards.

His Cuban foray had roots that went back to 1976, when Fidel Castro gave permission for a group of American musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and Earl Hines, to visit Cuba, provided they played a concert there. Cooder heard about the trip and went along.

He brought back hundreds of albums of Cuban music, and a determination to go back again and record with Cuban artists.

He realised his ambition with his friend Nick Gold, who owns the record label World Circuit. Compay Segundo and Ruben Gonzalez, who at that time no longer owned a piano, both joined them. Cooder bumped into Omara Portuondo, who was once known as the Cuban Diana Ross, and got her to help. Gonzalez brought in a friend, Cachaoito Lopez, who played bass. Others were summoned from all over Cuba.

Ibrahim Ferrer arrived in the Havana recording studio at the moment that Ruben Gonzalez - who Cooder described as a cross between Thelonius Monk and Felix the Cat - was playing a classic bolero. Ferrer started to sing along. Nick Gold says "We knew immediately that here was one of the strongest songs for the album, and I thought Ibrahim was one of the best singers I'd ever heard." The fact that Ferrer has now become so celebrated for his performances of such romantic ballads is particularly ironic because the groups he played with before his premature retirement in 1991 refused to let him sing them. "They told me my voice was only suited to the faster, dance numbers," he says.

In the group, Compay Segundo had the presence of the band sergeant-major, sitting or standing very straight, always with a straw trilby on his head, a Cohiba cigar in one hand and yelling at other members of the band.

Cooder had great respect for him. He said, "If you listen to 'Buena Vista Social Club'… you can hear something very special going on when he's singing and playing. He became the fulcrum. The pivot around which we worked.

"And when Compay isn't there, it somehow sounds more sterile. It wasn't his voice or his songs, it was just him. His presence. He had a personal magnetism and he was totally charismatic. When you get to that age, you're in touch with something else that doesn't fit with the linear world in which the rest of us live. His world was his own, like a little atmosphere he carried around with him.

"It was Compay's song, 'Chan Chan', that became 'Buena Vista''s calling card. I knew the song before we went to Cuba because I had it on record. The funny thing is that I didn't even think it was his best song. I liked it. But I liked others better. I certainly had no idea it would become the record's theme tune. But it's got a great chord progression with a modal quality that is quite Spanish and it became the one you hear in bars and cafes all over the world. "Cuban son (Segundo's specialty - guitar-led Cuban blues) is one of the highest and most sophisticated forms of folk art, up there with Indian music and flamenco. It's full of poetry and stories and word imagery and he was the master.

"What a remarkable musician. I watched him play guitar, and he would say, 'now you do it'. And I couldn't. It wasn't just his dexterity or his chops - I can do that, because I've been playing music for 40 years. He had something else that I couldn't replicate…

"Compay was a fun guy with a zest for life. He was very amused by almost everything. He had a Zen-like state which made you realise it's not for nothing that the Buddha is always smiling. Something would happen and he would wink at you and tilt that hat at an even more rakish angle and puff smoke rings from his cigar. He believed that life was fun and making music was fun. He had lived long enough and done it long enough to know that if it wasn't fun, it wasn't worth doing.

"I once asked him about politics, which isn't something you do lightly with Cubans. He looked at me and said: 'Politics? This new guy is good. The 1930s were rough. That's when we had the really bad times.' That's how old he was. He had seen dictators and revolutions come and go in his life, and to him, Castro was 'the new guy'."

When the 'Buena Vista' album was well on its way to being the Grammy-winning hit it became, Cooder suggested his filmmaker friend Wim Wenders make a film about the musicians. When Wenders first heard the ballads, boleros and sons of the 'Buena Vista Social Club' on the rough demo cassette Cooder gave him, he was knocked sideways. Two years later, Wenders arrived in Havana for a three-week stay with a Steadicam operator, a soundman and only a very vague idea of what he wanted to shoot.

"Not only was this my first documentary," he said, "but also I had never done anything even remotely like it. On 'Paris, Texas', Ry found and uncovered and dug out the music that was in the film, picking away in front of the screen. But here we already had the music, and in a strange kind of way it was like having a script. The music gave us a tone, a rhythm, a lightness, a fluidity."

It was Wenders' gradually-dawning understanding of the musicians themselves that shaped the film. "When I saw them for the first time, these amazingly natural, elegant, graceful, funny, modest people, with so much history and life and experience behind them, it dawned on me that this couldn't be the straightforward musical documentary I was planning," he said. "It was really more of a character piece than anything else. They became more and more like fictional characters. The dimensions of the story were far greater than I'd imagined - in the end it felt like making a movie with Mickey Rooney or Humphrey Bogart or some other older, bigger-than-life actor."

Wenders is no stranger to good music. The Stones and the Kinks provided the score for a couple of his very early short films. For 'Wings of Desire', he used Laurie Anderson and Nick Cave, and for 'Until the End' of the World, a roll-call of greats: Robbie Robertson, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, T-Bone Burnett, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Michael Stipe - and Ry Cooder. 'Buena Vista Social Club' was a high point, though, Wenders says.

"I've never given the same piece of music to so many people in my life, and everyone who heard it called me back the next day to say wow. I don't know any other kind of music that fills you up like this, but without also emptying you out. It's like a form of nourishment."