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extraction and encouraged her intellectual and musical curiosity. She endured abuse from a brother and an adult male during her childhood and was pretty much the only ‘Indian’ in the towns where she grew up. But she managed to get away to college where she studied philosophy.
Selling Folk Music: An
Illustrated History Ronald D. Cohen & David Bonner Univer- sity Press Of Mississippi ISBN 978-1-62846- 215-9
A big caveat emptor job, this one. “A colour- ful account of the history of folk music told through the images used to sell it,” says the heading on the back cover blurb. Which is borderline true as far as it goes – that ‘folk’ means the American context only (including cowboy songs, calypso, spirituals, hootenan- ny hilarity and singer/songwriters) and it stops arbitrarily at around 1970. Oh, and it’ll set you back £65.50 on Amazon UK!
The images included begin in the second decade of the last century but really kick off in the 1930s, and are mostly songbook and sheet music covers with the occasional con- cert flier. Then later on, as it reaches the late 1950s and ’60s, it’s more the covers of maga- zines and festival programmes. In an effort to cram in as many as possible, while the reproduction quality is very good, the sizes are small and the higgledy-piggledy layout a bit of a mess, frankly. They proudly boast of “almost 500 images” but they’re crammed into just 136 pages (the rest are index, a short introductory text, and twelve are blank!). It’s a feast of vintage period-piece typography and graphic design, but the impact is sacrificed.
As for “the images used to sell it,” there are giant areas of glaring omission. There are no record covers – there’s a beautiful coffee table book to be made just out of Folkways/ RBF covers alone, in the style of those gor- geous Blue Note books – let alone the labels big, medium and small from Prestige through Vanguard and Elektra to Columbia. And that’s just sticking to the US-centric plot. There are no artist publicity photos – a classic example of how image was used to sell folk music, if ever there was. There aren’t even any record adverts from within the maga- zines they’ve illustrated.
Frankly, while obviously well-inten-
tioned, it’s a massive and hugely over-priced wasted opportunity. Really, do something properly or don’t do it at all…
Ian Anderson Buffy Sainte-Marie: The
Authorized Biography Andrea Warner Greystone Books, ISBN 978- 1-77164-358-0
This biography is well written and readable, though less informative than might be hoped – I guess it is ‘authorized’ and I suspect Saint- Marie is quite a private person.
It recounts her childhood in Maine and Massachusetts, having been adopted out of a Native American reserve in Saskatchewan. She was luckier than many others who were sent away to boarding schools to have their culture drained or beaten out of them, since her adoptive mother was of part Mi’kmaq
But she’d started singing and writing songs and increasingly this became her main occupation (and income). Her first contract with Vanguard was not a good one (for her) – she had no lawyer of her own. She encoun- tered various other setbacks, some of which she didn’t discover until many years later (e.g. her black-listing by both the LBJ and Nixon administrations). Some of her best-known songs were often attributed to other people who had recorded them (eg Universal Soldier, Till It’s Time for You to Go). But she kept writ- ing and singing her songs, founding educa- tion projects, supporting various Indigenous activist groups, and astonishing audiences with the power of her performances. Her involvement in the children’s TV show Sesame Street was important in ‘normalising’ an Indigenous person in mainstream media. She was the first person to be seen breast-feeding her baby on TV (“What are you doing, Buffy?”, said Big Bird!). She was also probably the first person to make an album ‘over the internet’ before the internet was really a thing – using midi files sent via Compuserve to producer Chris Birkett, back in 1990. I can remember how excited she was about this when I interviewed her around that time.
The book includes a lot of descriptions of
Sainte-Marie’s songwriting and numerous recordings which I guess would be interesting for a reader who had never heard her music, but not needed by someone who has kept up with her music since buying that first-ever recording It’s My Way out of her pocket- money in about 1965. There’s a nice little for- ward from Joni Mitchell (whose cassette recordings Sainte-Marie used to tote around to play to various promoters of coffee-house gigs).
greystonebooks.com Maggie Holland
Around The Blooming Heather: A Personal Mem-
oir Of Whitby Folk Week Gordon Tyrrall Gaho Publishing ISBN 978-1- 5272-3324-9
Two things ought to be made clear right from the outset of this review – this reviewer has the highest regard for Gordon Tyrrall both as a person and as a performer. It turns out that he is a pretty good writer as well. I also regard Whitby Folk Week as one of the most enjoyable, certainly the most egalitarian fes- tivals in the UK. Not that I have anything like the experience of the festival as the writer, who has spent over 35 August weeks there.
What we have here is a very affection- ate, well-observed but ultimately very per- sonal memoir of an event that has been enjoyed by thousands over the years.
Like the festival itself, the book is full of encounters and is heavy on names; celebrat- ing and enjoying the company of like-minded others is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the folk scene. People who have been around the scene for a while are going to encounter lots of friends and associates; this reader reached page 40 before he came across a name that he has not met – and there were only a few after that.
Gordon takes us round the festival's many venues and tells us what their particu- lar strengths are, sometimes inserting a story of something that happened there. Else- where he diverts into other aspects of his long life as a professional musician and there is short chapter on the merits and disadvan- tages of various guitar tunings.
It isn't an autobiography, though there is one moving chapter on losing a loved one – also in the context of the festival.
If you've already been to Whitby Folk
Week then you will be bound to enjoy this book. If you read it and you haven't been there then you will want to go.
gordontyrrall.co.uk Vic Smith Buffy Sainte-Marie receives her People’s Voice Award at the 2019 Folk Alliance International
Photo: Monica Mansfield
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