f50 Still Fearless
Buffy Sainte-Marie has re-recorded some of the major songs from her 50+ year career. Because they’re as relevant today, and at 77 she’s still got the power. Tony Montague pins her down.
O
nce Buffy Sainte-Marie starts talking about her life and music the words flow freely, occasionally punctuated by a chuckle or a laugh. Her mind
moves this way and that, sifting through memories, thoughts, images, sounds. After many months on the road with her band she’s home for winter, on one of the smaller islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, where she lives with her partner, their cat, and a herd of goats. Time to reflect, to restore.
In November the Cree artist and activist, born in Saskatchewan, launched one of the most important albums in her long career. For Medicine Songs Buffy re- recorded seventeen of her finest songs of protest and empowerment in new arrangements. And she added a couple of recent compositions – the earth-stomping You’ve Got To Run, and two different takes of The War Racket, her compelling indictment of militarism – to show she’s still at the top of the songwriting game.
When asked her intentions with Medicine Songs Buffy sets off on a long response that touches on the music indus- try, indigenous rights, Greenwich Village and London in the 1960s, Child ballads, the craft of writing, the art of performing, toxic politics and more. It’s an exhilarating ride through time. She’s very relaxed, and talks for an hour and a half.
“I write in so many different styles, and my albums are similar only in that they’re very diverse – love songs and protest songs and empowerment songs and country songs all on the same album. So that’s good, that’ll work. However, you know I’ve been on the road for about 50 years. I’ve taken some time off, but it’s been pretty intense the past four years. So I’m doing these songs each night and – through the Harper days, and now the Trump days – seeing people really wake up to things they were not noticing before, seeing things come to a head in terms of public awareness.“
“After every concert people would ask me – how is it that I could have written these songs five or 20 or 40 or 50 years ago? Where can they find Now That The Buffalo’s Gone or The Big Ones Get Away
or Universal Soldier? They’re scattered over 50 years of recordings, but they’re not old songs to me. I do them every night to a different audience. I really do like it to work as medicine. If I sing a song like Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee – which is about a terrible subject, just awful – I always follow it with a song that’s really uplifting and empowering, like Starwalker or You’ve Got To Run or Soldier Blue.”
“So I really wanted to just corral all the songs of meaning – empowerment songs and protest songs. There’s not really a word for empowerment songs. I don’t know what else to call them. A strong protest song like Universal Soldier is infor- mative and I think it can have a big impact on some people’s worlds. It really can speak and put into words things a lot of people are thinking. And I have a lot of those songs, so I wanted to put them all on one album. There were too many for one CD, so we ended up putting thirteen songs on the CD and people can free-download another seven.” [See the review in fR417.]
“I wanted to put the songs to work. Look at Canada during the Harper days [2006-2015] – where was the great music? Where was the music to inspire people? It was mostly in small clubs and conversations in the back of people’s cars, the Idle No More [indigenous peoples] movement. There’s been a lot of public interaction with things that perhaps governmentswould prefer to keep private – whether you’re talking about Residential Schools, or the build-up to war, or the impoverishment of students for the rest of their lives trying to pay back phoney loans. During the Harper, Bush, and Trump years there was a lot of social commentary online but there hasn’t been much in terms of music. These songs of mine just happened to fit, probably because this isn’t really a turn of the page.“
“So many people who’ve been sleep- ing through a lot of political controversy, suddenly had to wake up – and boy are they ever shocked! Yet a lot of us are not shocked, we’ve seen it coming. We’re a big collection of people, some of us more aware and some of us more able to access information and contribute to the infor- mation stream. And yet others have their hands tied and their ears blocked by those
who don’t want them to know so clearly how stupidly corrupt people in positions of power can become.”
“All the stuff that’s coming out in headlines right now, none of it’s new, some of us have been writing about it a long, long time. So some of us are being discovered – people are saying ‘oh wow, I never heard of her’; ‘Universal Soldier, that’s interesting’. Universal Soldier is basi- cally common sense, and that’s really the tie-in to genuine folk music.”
“I was very lucky in that I came up dur- ing what we call the folk music era, the mid- to late-’60s. It was a very interesting atmosphere. It was students basically, high-school and college students, that kind of age demographic. There was a war going on. We didn’t want to send our friends to die in somebody’s stupid busi- ness-war. There was a cohesiveness, I guess you’d call it, a critical mass of students who were listening to nonsense and calling ‘bullshit!’ on it.”
“I
n the case of my songs, what’s cool is the common- sense factor of say Universal Soldier or Now That The Buf- falo’s Gone, and that style of
writing. If you go to my website and look for Universal Soldier in depth, every line of the song has another line under it of expla- nation. For instance it says ‘he’s five-foot two, and he’s six-foot four’ – that’s not something I just made up to be cool, those were the actual height parameters for a soldier during the Vietnam War. So the song is imbued with details that are just plain accurate. It’s not new information.”
“What a songwriter can do is order the phrases, the information in ways that make common sense to the listener. A three-minute song can be more impactful than a big fat book that will never be read. So in the history of folk music the Child Ballads – to focus on the UK for a second – which of course trickle down to everywhere else just because English is so widely spoken. How lucky I was to be around people like Martin Carthy and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger who were singing songs 400 or 500 years old. The songs that have lasted are about univer- sal themes.”
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