The Wild Reed: Happy Birthday, Buffy!

– Image: Julie Jocsak (2017)

Trail-blazing and influential singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie turns 84 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 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)

Buffy was in the news recently after the Canadian government rescinded its appointment of Buffy to the Order of Canada, the country’s most prestigious civilian accolade. Although no specific reason was given for the termination, it seems to be the result of the October 2023 CBC documentary that challenged Buffy’s long-standing claims of Indigenous ancestry. Today’s post isn’t about any of this, in large part because I’ve addressed the fall-out from this documentary previously at The Wild Reed (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). Instead, I celebrate Buffy’s life and work in their totality today, her 84th birthday.

I start this celebration Buffy by sharing the haunting ballad “Must I Go Bound,” the opening track of Buffy’s second album Many a Mile, released in the year of my birth – 1965. It’s followed by excerpts from Andrea Warner’s Buffy Sainte-Marie: the Authorized Biography, published in 2018.

[Buffy] confronted colonialism in her activism and with her music. On her 1965 album, Many a Mile, she covered several British traditional folk songs [including “Must I Go Bound”], but her originals were deeply rooted in her activism and core beliefs, including “Welcome Emigrante” and “The Piney Wood Hills.” She didn’t always get the credit she deserved as a songwriter, but Sainte-Marie was accummulating professional power. She continued to use the spotlight to talk about Indigenous issues and alternative conflict resolution, but she also began to push her sound away from coffee-house acoustic.

. . . [Many a Mile also includes] two glorious covers – Bukka White’s “Fixin’ to Die” and Patrick Sky’s “Many a Mile.” [Buffy] also recorded what would be her own most covered song of all time: “Until It’s Time for You to Go.” It quickly became a pop standard, and was a hit for everyone from the Four Pennies to Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.