The Wild Reed: Happy Birthday, Buffy!

Monday, February 20, 2023

Happy Birthday, Buffy!

– Image: Akasha Rabut for the New York Times
(November 2022)

Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie turns 82 today.

Happy Birthday, Buffy!

As regulars readers will know, I’ve long admired Buffy Sainte-Marie and enjoyed her music. Indeed, I find her to be a very inspiring figure. (I even chose her song “It’s My Way” as my theme song when I turned 50 in 2015!)

Left: With Buffy after her August 26, 2016 performance at The Dakota in Minneapolis.

I especially appreciate and am inspired by Buffy’s passion and purposefulness – and by the way she blends her art and social activism. I’ve seen her four times in concert, and had the privilege of meeting and talking with her on three of these occasions. She’s creative, articulate, warm, and funny – a very human human being.

Buffy’s most recent album is the award-winning Medicine Songs (2017), about which Buffy says the following.

[Medicine Songs] is a collection of front line songs about unity and resistance – some brand new and some classics – and I want to put them to work. These are songs I've been writing for over fifty years, and what troubles people today are still the same damn issues from 30-40-50 years ago: war, oppression, inequity, violence, rankism of all kinds, the pecking order, bullying, racketeering and systemic greed. Some of these songs come from the other side of that: positivity, common sense, romance, equity and enthusiasm for life.

I really want this collection of songs to be like medicine, to be of some help or encouragement, to maybe do some good. Songs can motivate you and advance your own ideas, encourage and support collaborations and be part of making change globally and at home. They do that for me and I hope this album can be positive and provide thoughts and remedies that rock your world and inspire new ideas of your own.

Above: Buffy and guitarist Anthony King performing at the Big Top Chautauqua, Bayfield, WI on Saturday, August 27, 2016. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)

In celebrating Buffy today at The Wild Reed I share the trailer to the PBS American Masters’ documentary, Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, released last November. It’s followed by excerpts from Lindsay Zoladz’s November 21, 2022 New York Times profile of Buffy. Enjoy!

[Buffy’s] buzzy performances [at the famed Gaslight Cafe in 1963] led to a deal with Vanguard Records; a year later, she released her indelible debut album, It’s My Way!, which featured “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” along with a few other songs that were destined to be covered by countless artists across generations: the stirring anti-war ballad “Universal Soldier” and the harrowing “Co’dine,” an early and unfortunately still relevant tale of opiate addiction. Plenty more modern standards would follow later in her career, including romantic fare like “Until It’s Time for You to Go” (Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding song, apparently) and the ’80s pop hit “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, for which Sainte-Marie won an Oscar – the first ever awarded to a Native American.

Still, Sainte-Marie said, “It wasn’t about careerism at all.”

“I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she said. “I didn’t care whether I ever had a hit. I was trying to write songs that were meaningful enough to enough people so that, like an antique chair, people would dig it, appreciate it, take care of it and pass it on, because it had value and wasn’t going to fall apart.”

In one sense, that has certainly happened. Sainte-Marie has become incredibly influential to artists of many different ages and genres: Joni Mitchell, Robbie Robertson, Neko Case, the Indigo Girls, Steppenwolf’s John Kay and the classical musician Jeremy Dutcher are all vocal admirers. “She’s a massive bright light and a guide to so many,” the Polaris Prize-winning Indigenous musician Tanya Tagaq, who collaborated with Sainte-Marie on a 2017 song, said in a phone interview. “She was that even when she was young, but now that she’s older, it’s almost like she’s laid the foundation to let us raise our voices so that we can be heard.”

But many of Sainte-Marie’s fans also believe she hasn’t quite gotten her due, especially in the United States. Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls – whose rollicking cover of Sainte-Marie’s 1992 anthem “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” has long been a staple in their set list – said in a phone interview, “To me, she’s a household name.”

“But she didn’t get that career that Dylan or Joni or even Joan Baez and some of the other folk singers of her era did,” she continued.

The director Madison Thomas’s lively new documentary Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, though, makes the case for Sainte-Marie’s continued importance and offers a welcoming primer on Sainte-Marie’s life as a songwriter, performer and activist. Saliers said the timing is fortuitous for a new audience to come to Sainte-Marie’s music: “She started recording in the ’60s, but we need her now more than ever. I think that people in this country are seeking meaning in their music in a way that they haven’t for a long time.”

. . . Despite all of the challenges of her life, Sainte-Marie’s infectiously hopeful energy and radiant smile seem impermeable to cynicism and despair. “I don’t like misery of any kind,” she said. “So if something starts bothering me, I either put up an umbrella or I go inside. I do something about it, because I’m really uncomfortable being unhappy. I try to keep my nose on the joy trail.”