Buffy Sainte-Marie

• Born: February 20, 1942
• Place of Birth: Piapot Reserve, Saskatchewan, Canada

• CANADIAN FOLKSINGER, GUITARIST, AND SONGWRITER

Sainte-Marie is regarded as one of the first activist Native American popular musicians. She is known for her powerful protest songs, but she also composed romantic ballads and brought her distinctive vocal style and musical ideas to folksinging, rock, country, and electronic music.

The Life

Beverly Sainte-Marie was born on the Piapot Cree reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada. Soon orphaned, she was adopted by American relatives partially of Native American descent and raised in Massachusetts. In her teenage years, she reconnected with the Cree tribe and learned its traditions, ceremonies, and teachings. Although her 1962 degree from the University of Massachusetts was in philosophy and teaching, by the end of 1963 her performances in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village established her as a major folksinger and songwriter.

Sainte-Marie moved to Hawaii in the late 1960s and in 1974 married Hawaiian surfing teacher Dewain Bugbee. When that marriage failed, she married Sheldon Wolfchild, with whom she had a son, Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild. From 1976 to 1981, she and her son Cody appeared on the children’s television show Sesame Street. During this time, she earned a Ph.D. in fine arts and became active in the Baha’i faith. In 1983, she married musician-composer Jack Nitzsche, and in 1993 she settled down with the man who would become her husband some years later, Hawaiian Chuck Wilson.

Sainte-Marie remained active within the Native American community; in 1996 she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, a curriculum based on Native American cultural perspectives. In her later years, she exhibited her digital art in museums and galleries, served as an adjunct professor at various educational institutions, and lectured on a number of subjects in the United States and Canada. Her music has received numerous awards, especially in Canada.

The Music

Sainte-Marie began her musical career in the early 1960s, singing folk and jazz favorites as well as her original compositions. By 1965, her musical originality and distinctive voice brought her both a national and an international following. Sainte-Marie’s performances were distinguished by her unmistakable voice, with its broad vibrato and a timbre that ranged seamlessly from the harsh to the tender. Also distinctive was Sainte-Marie’s use of the mouth-bow, a traditional Native American instrument, which became a signature part of her sound, along with her original, self-taught guitar style.

It’s My Way. One of the few female singer-songwriters on the contemporary music scene, Sainte-Marie was also the only musical artist who introduced a Native American perspective into her work; her trademark song “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” is widely considered to be the first Native American protest song. This song was recorded in 1964 on Sainte-Marie’s first album, It’s My Way, which also included “Universal Soldier.” Inspired by wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam, “Universal Soldier” became an anthem of the antiwar movement. This album featured “Cod’ine,” based on Sainte-Marie’s own experience with the drug and placing her ahead of her generation in addressing the issue of drug addiction. It’s My Way was more musically adventurous than the average folk album, and several of its songs were covered by other performers with great commercial success.

Many a Mile. Although Sainte-Marie is generally associated with protest music, her second album, Many a Mile, featured her gentle love song “Until It’s Time for You to Go.” This song was covered by many popular singers of the time, including Elvis Presley, Cher, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, and Carmen McRae. “Sometimes When I Get to Thinkin’” and “Soulful Shade of Blue” further established her reputation as a writer of romantic ballads.

“My Country’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying.” Sainte-Marie’s subsequent albums also included original ballads and protest music, as well as traditional folk songs. Her powerful song about the betrayal of Native Americans, “My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” generated considerable controversy and is a good example of the passion and sense of contained fury associated with her performance of her protest songs. “Starwalker,” written in the early 1970s, became an anthem of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Sainte-Marie also explored other types of music, such as country, rock, and art songs; her experimental album Illuminations was avant-garde in its deployment of the Buchla synthesizer and, while speaking to the 1960s interest in the psychedelic, also evoked a sense of timeless mysticism.

Coincidence and Likely Stories. By 1977, Sainte-Marie had stopped recording as a result of the waning of the folk music scene and an unofficial government blacklisting of artists associated with criticism of the Vietnam War. She found renewed musical recognition in 1982, when she received an Academy Award, along with cowriters Will Jennings and Jack Nitzsche, for the song “Up Where We Belong,” written for the film An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) and performed by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. In 1992, after a sixteen-year break from recording, Sainte-Marie employed her computer to produce the album Coincidence and Likely Stories in her home studio in Hawaii. While her lyrics continued her idiom of protest and love songs, her music featured the synthesized sounds of electronic music instead of the acoustic guitar and mouth-bow of her early records. Throughout her musical career, Sainte-Marie’s work has demonstrated sustained creativity as well as considerable versatility. The warmth, power, and striking timbre of her voice remained unchanged, as did her social and political concerns, especially those involving Native American rights and Native American culture.

Up Where We Belong. Featuring Sainte-Marie's own performance of her Academy Award–winning song as the title track, the 1996 album Up Where We Belong won Sainte-Marie the prestigious Juno Award for Best Music of Aboriginal Canada Recording, a category later renamed Indigenous Music Album of the Year. (The Juno Awards are given annually by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences to Canadian musicians of outstanding achievement.) The album included a number of rerecordings of older songs.

Running for the Drum. Sainte-Marie recorded this album partly in her home studio and partly in France from 2006 to 2007 and released it in 2008. Featuring two songs with heavy influence from the music of Indigenous peoples, "Cho Cho Fire" and the album's only single, "No No Keshagesh," the album won Sainte-Marie her second Juno Award for best indigenous album in 2009.

Power in the Blood. Released in 2015, Power in the Blood consisted of a combination of rerecordings, new songs, and covers, with rock and electronic influences that drew comparisons to such famously eccentric artists Kate Bush and Bjork. The album won Sainte-Marie another Juno Award for best indigenous album, as well as the award for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year. She was also nominated for Songwriter of the Year for three of the songs on the album, "Farm in the Middle of Nowhere," "Ke Sakihitin Awasis (I Love You Baby)," and "Love Charms (Mojo Bijoux)." The album also won the 2015 Polaris Music Prize, which recognizes one outstanding Canadian album each year.

Medicine Songs. Motivated by the tempestuous political climate, Sainte-Marie released the album Medicine Songs in 2017. The album contained both new songs and rerecorded and rearranged versions of older songs, all dealing with themes of unity and resistance against war and oppression. Though her usual folk style appears on some tracks, the album overall has a contemporary pop sound and even some rap influences; Sainte-Marie wrote on her website that she hoped this would help to bring her political messages to a younger generation. Of the title, she wrote that she hoped that the songs, like medicine, would "be of some help or encouragement . . . maybe do some good." Medicine Songs once again won the Juno Award for Indigenous Music Album of the Year and was nominated for an Indigenous Music Award for Best Folk Album, while her video for the song "The War Racket" was nominated for Best Music Video.

Musical Legacy

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a major force in folk and popular music in the 1960s. An innovative artist, she has explored folk, rock, country, pop, and art songs and was an early adopter of electronic music and the personal computer as a means of musical expression. While her unusual voice made it difficult for her to succeed as a commercial singer, her songs became hits when recorded by other artists; her much-recorded ballad “Until It’s Time for You to Go” has become a standard. She has a legacy of protest songs, especially concerning Native Americans, and is regarded as the one of few Native Americans to have enjoyed worldwide popularity in the field of popular music. She has received many awards, especially for songs that demonstrate her support for Native American culture and for social justice. Her protest song “Universal Soldier” was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005.

The artist was the subject of Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry it On (2022), a documentary that tells the story of Sainte-Marie's life and career. The film went on to win an International Emmy Award for Best Arts Programming. In 2023, Sainte-Marie announced that she was retiring from live performances. That same year, she became the subject of international controversey when an investigation by CBC News alleged that Sainte-Marie had fabricated her Indigenous ancestry. The musician denied the allegations.

Principal Recordings

ALBUMS: It’s My Way, 1964; Many a Mile, 1965; Little Wheel Spin and Spin, 1966; Fire and Fleet and Candlelight, 1967; I’m Gonna Be a Country Girl Again, 1968; Illuminations, 1969; She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina, 1971; Moonshot, 1972; Native North American Child, 1973; Quiet Places, 1973; Buffy, 1974; Changing Woman, 1975; Sweet America, 1976; Coincidence and Likely Stories, 1992; Up Where We Belong, 1996.

Bibliography

Hunter, Shaun. Visual and Performing Artists. New York: Crabtree, 1999.

Kaur, Harmeet. "Buffy Sainte-Marie Is the Latest Public Figure Accused of Being a 'Pretendian.' Here's Why That Matters." CNN, 29 Nov. 2023, www.cnn.com/2023/11/29/entertainment/buffy-sainte-marie-cbc-indigenous-questions-cec/index.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Leigh, Spencer. "Buffy Sainte-Marie: 'I Constantly Ask Myself. Where Are the Great Protest Songs of Today? Are People Deaf and Blind?'" The Independent, 9 Jan. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/buffy-sainte-marie-medicine-songs-cree-canadian-indian-donald-trump-bob-dylan-alabama-1-a8149166.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

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Powers, Ann. Review of Power in the Blood, by Buffy Sainte-Marie. First Listen, National Public Radio, 3 May 2015, www.npr.org/2015/05/03/403277165/first-listen-buffy-sainte-marie-power-in-the-blood. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Rayner, Ben. "Buffy Sainte-Marie on Her Fresh Dose of Old Medicine." The Toronto Star, 15 Nov. 2017, www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/2017/11/15/buffy-sainte-marie-on-her-fresh-dose-of-old-medicine.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Sainte-Marie, Buffy. The Buffy Sainte-Marie Songbook. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1972.

Thompson, Christian, ed. Saskatchewan First Nations: Lives Past and Present. Regina, Sask.: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2004.

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