The Wild Reed: Sweet America

In acknowledging the significance of the Fourth of July here in the U.S., I share Buffy Sainte-Marie’s recording of songwriter Barry Greenfield’s “Sweet America.”

“Sweet America” is the title-track of the album Buffy recorded in 1976, one which she co-produced with Henry Lewy. Apart from this and another track by Greenfield (“Free the Lady”), the remaining 14 songs on the album were written by Buffy. (Greenberg had previously recorded both “Sweet America” and “Free the Lady” for his 1973 album, Blue Sky.)

Buffy’s rendition of “Sweet America” was first issued on CD by the British Big Beat label, on a 2-CD collection that included all three of Buffy's mid-1970s albums – Buffy (1974), Changing Woman (1975), and Sweet America (1976). The tracks of all three albums have been subseqently re-released by Buffy’s own label, Gypsy Boy Music, on a similarly packaged 2-CD collection entitled The Pathfinder – Buried Treasures: The Mid-70s Recordings.

The song “Sweet America” is no sentimental tribute to the U.S., but rather a thoughtful reflection that’s part lament, part critique of the socio-political and environmental state of the country; the latter being gut-wrenchingly conveyed by the line: “I love California, but I’m watching her die.”

Writes Ken Hunt about Buffy’s 1976 album, Sweet America:

Sweet America, originally released on ABC Records, got a rough deal from some critics. Unfairly. “One of her weakest albums,” was Irwin and Lyndon Stambler’s opinion in Folk & Blues – The Encyclopedia (2001), but the judgement that presides over opinion is that Sweet America reveals a woman in charge with, by turns, a knowing sense of sensuality and sexuality, political engagement, and still cleaving to the themes that raised her above the folksinger morass.

. . . Sweet America would be her last recording flourish until the release of Coincidence and Likely Stories in 1992, which broke her self-imposed embargo on recording. [At that time] she told the London-based singer-songwriter Robb Johnson in an interview for Rock & Reel that she “quit recording when my son was born 15 years ago.”

Not that motherhood ever stopped her writing and making music. She was still writing the chapters of her life. She became a stalwart on Sesame Street after Sweet America, and that long-running series enabled her to introduce the English-speaking world to Native American issues, as she would also do in Perry Como’s television special Christmas in New Mexico in 1979 – in which she sang "Star Walker," duetted with Como on "Until It’s Time For You to Go," and played mouth bow, an instrument that Patrick Sky had introduced her to. She composed for films, notable ones such as An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Starman (1984), The Jewel of the Nile (1985), and 9 1/2 Weeks (1986).

In should be noted that for her contribution to An Officer and a Gentelman, the song “Up Where We Belong,” which she co-wrote with Jack Nitzsche and Will Jennings, Buffy won an Ocsar in 1983, becoming the first Indigenous person to do so.