Born in Saskatchewan and raised by adopted parents in Maine and Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was an overnight success in the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene of the 1960s. She wrote the anti-war song "Universal Soldier," which was recorded by Donovan and many others, unwittingly giving away her publishing rights to the song for $1 (and partially buying them back years later for $25K). Another early song was "Cod'ine" which she wrote in 1964 after a doctor got her addicted to the opiate drug, from which the young singer went into withdrawals when she stopped.
Another hit was "Until It's Time for You to Go," a modern, feminist love song that asked for no commitment from a man. It was recorded 37 times by Elvis Presley and by 157 other artists. (This time she was smart enough not to relinquish her publishing rights, even when Elvis's manager tried to insist.)
"Show business changed," she says in the documentary. "The drug went from coffee and a little pot to alcohol and a little cocaine, and a lot of coffeehouses went out of business. And it just went from a time of innocence to a time of, 'Goose it. Here's where the money is.'"
Sainte-Marie was true to and outspoken about her Native American heritage, calling the genocide against her people by that word when others would not. She became involved in the American Indian Movement, which was infiltrated by an FBI agent who took it in a violent direction. Hoover's FBI sent letters to radio stations across the US ordering them not to play her songs, something she was unaware of until a DJ showed her one of the letters years later.
When the popular TV show The Virginian offered her a lead role in 1968, Buffy accepted only if all Indigenous roles were played by Indigenous actors. After a five-year stint as a regular cast member on Sesame Street where she raised awareness of Native Americans and breastfed her baby on air, Sante-Marie won an Oscar for co-writing "Up Where We Belong," the soaring theme to An Officer and a Gentleman, with her then-husband Jack Nitzsche. After Nitzsche, a heroin addict, injected her unwillingly with the drug, taking her back to her Cod'ine days, she left him.
Taking a break from her career to raise her son and live on a remote farm in Hawai'i, Sainte-Marie has returned as a recording artist, winning Canada's prestigious Polis Music Prize in 2015 for her album "Power in the Blood," with this lyric in the title song:
Corporation government selling me some cover-up
Weaponizing pesticides; poison in my groceries
Nothing but another drug, a license they can buy and sell
At the age of 81, she actively tours and works on various charities she has started. I've heard her say she takes "zero" alcohol and I suppose the same is true for marijuana (although I'd love to hear otherwise).
Sainte-Marie performed at the 2016 "Hardly Strictly Bluegrass" festival in San Francisco, opening with her signature song "It's My Way," just as the documentary begins, leading into interviews with Sainte-Marie along with Joni Mitchell, John Kay (Steppenwolf), Robbie Robertson (The Band), Jackson Browne and others. Here she is singing the song at the 2019 CBC Music Festival, with a red dress hanging onstage to represent missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, 5,203 of which were reported missing to the FBI in 2001. "It's all because of the Doctrine of Discovery," Sainte-Marie says in the film. "If explorers come across an inhabited land, you can enslave the inhabitants if they will become Christians, otherwise you can kill them. Those laws are still in place now."
Sainte-Marie's biggest regret about having her music suppressed isn't as much about how her career suffered, but rather seeing her message squelched. "I learned that sometimes you have to carry the medicine for a long time before it's time to administer it," she says. "You don't have to go in and tear everything down. I mean, that'll take you forever and it's impossible. No, just cook it up yourself, and once people get a whiff of the real deal, a lot of them are going to just say, 'Oh, I see.'"
No comments:
Post a Comment