Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On (Eagle Vision, Manitoba, Ontario Hydro, Paquin Entertainment Group, White Pine Pictures, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After “The Joni Mitchell Songbook” PBS ran another documentary on a legendary folksinger who gut her start in the 1960’s and is still alive: Buffy Sainte-Marie. The show was called Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On and told the story of this fascinating figure in American music and culture. She was born in Canada on February 20, 1941 to a Cree Indian couple on the Piapot 75 Reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan. But at age two or three she was forcibly removed from her parents to be raised by an adoptive family in Massachusetts under the name Beverly Sainte-Marie. This was part of a deliberate policy by the Canadian government to rip apart Native American families and assign their children to be raised by white families so they would grow up without any knowledge of the supposedly “barbarous” Native traditions. Buffy described herchildhood as a nightmare of abuse, including sexual abuse, that ended only when she was old enough to go to college at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she graduated with degrees on teaching and Oriental philosophy. She also realized she had an aptitude for music when her parents received a second-hand piano as a gift, and she began copying songs she heard by ear. Later she also taught herself guitar, and in the early 1960’s she moved to New York City and settled in Greenwich Village. Buffy made the rounds of the coffeehouses that showcased folk acts, and she got crucial support from the young Bob Dylan. Dylan had already started to make a name for himself in the folk-music scene, and he recommended Buffy to the owners of venues where he’d played, including Gerde’s Folk City and the Gaslight Café.

Buffy Sainte-Marie looked like the stereotypical image of a woman folksinger – a face framed by long dark hair – but she didn’t have the pure soprano voice of Joan Baez, Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell. Instead she sang ini a hard, raspy voice that throbbed with emotion, which gave her songs – especially socially conscious ones like “Universal Soldier,” which she wrote after meeting some wounded veterans returning from Viet Nam at a time when the U.S. government was still denying that we were fighting a war there – an unusual edge. Indeed, it occurred to me that one reason Bob Dylan tried to boost Buffy Sainte-Marie’s career was he might have heard her as a female version of himself. Sainte-Marie signed a recording contract with Vanguard Records, the classical and folk label that had launched Joan Baez’s career, in 1964 and her first album for them was ironically titled It’s My Way – ironically because, as she says in an interview heard here, she was given no control over what material she was to record, how the album was to be mixed or which takes of the songs would be used. In fact, one of the artists interviewed for this documentary was Joni Mitchell, who said that Sainte-Marie had told him about her difficulties with the executives who ran Vanguard, and as a result Mitchell decided to turn down their offer to sign her. (That may be why, when Mitchell finally did sign a record contract with Warner Bros.’s Reprise label, she had it written into her contract that she would never have to take orders from a male in the studio.) Sainte-Marie recalled that when she first arrived in New York City she was disappointed at all the trash in the streets – like many other people, she’d been led to believe that everyone in New York was affluent – and she had never met a businessman or a lawyer. When she signed her first contract with Vanguard they asked her if she had a lawyer, and when she told them she didn’t, they said, “Then you can use ours.”

When a successful folk group called The Highwaymen offered to record her “Universal Soldier,” they asked who the publisher was. She said she didn’t have one, and a man at the next table at the restaurant where they were meeting introduced himself as a music publisher and bought the rights to “Universal Soldier” for $1. (Ten years later Sainte-Marie was able to buy back half the publishing for $25,000.) Like W. C. Handy, who was similarly gypped out of the publishing rights to his first hit, “Memphis Blues,” Sainte-Marie learned her lesson and never sold the publishing rights to one of her songs again. She even maintained that attitude when Elvis Presley wanted to record one of her songs, “Until It’s Time for You to Go” (which the makers of this documentary cite as a ground-breaking song because it acknowledges that love relationships are temporary and shouldn’t be expected to last “‘til death do us part”). Elvis and his scumbag manager, Col. Tom Parker, were notorious for demanding cut-in credits on every song Elvis recorded so Elvis would get a co-composer credit and, more importantly, 50 percent of the songwriting royalties. A lot of people put up with this to get Elvis to record their songs – among them singer-songwriter Otis Blackwell, who wrote “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up” and many of Elvis’s other big hits, who said he agreed to Col. Parker’s demand “because 50 percent of something is a whole lot better than 100 percent of nothing.” But Buffy Sainte-Marie refused, saying, “Elvis didn’t write the song – I did.” And she got away with it because, unbeknownst to her, Elvis and his wife Priscilla had made it “their song” and he was so determined to record it he overruled Parker (for once) and did so with Sainte-Marie credited as sole composer.

Buffy Sainte-Marie’s career nosedived at the end of the 1960’s because she had become an active supporter of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and as such was put on a blacklist by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had decided AIM was a subversive threat to his vision of America and anyone who associated with it or helped it financially needed to be stopped. Hoover sent a letter to radio stations throughout the country telling them to stop playing Sainte-Marie’s records – and virtually all of them complied. Sainte-Marie’s career dried up, which at the time she assumed merely was a common phenomenon in the music business – people ride a wave of popularity and then their audiences start to fade as the novelty wears off. Sainte-Marie made a comeback via an unusual avenue: Sesame Street. The Children’s Television Workshop, which produced the iconic program, originally approached her to write jingles for the show about the alphabet and arithmetic, but eventually they put her on as a personality, showcasing her nursing her recently born son Cody (Sainte-Marie noted in the documentary that there were no protests against her nursing her baby on TV when the show originally aired, but today when the clips are posted to YouTube there are a lot of scathing comments and demands that the “offensive” content be taken down.)

In 1982 Sainte-Marie’s career got another unexpected boost when the producers of the film An Officer and a Gentleman hired her and her then-boyfriend Jack Nitzsche (who had been musical director for Phil Spector’s fabled “Wall of Sound” recordings in the 1960’s) to write a song called “Up Where We Belong,” with Will Jennings as lyricist. The song was sung in the film by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warren, and one of Sainte-Marie’s friends interviewed for this documentary said that Cocker was quite closely copying Sainte-Marie’s phrasing in his singing. “Up Where We Belong” won the Academy Award for Best Song, though Sainte-Marie ruefully notes here that she remains the only Native American to have won a competitive Oscar. One thing Sainte-Marie is especially proud of is her efforts to expand opportunities for Native people in the film industry – she formed an organization for that purpose with, among other people, Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the 1950’s TV series The Lone Ranger and remains one of the few genuinely Native actors who’s played a Native character on TV. Sainte-Marie had already struck a blow for this cause when she was invited to be a guest star on an episode of the 1960’s TV series The Virginian, and one of her conditions for appearing was that all the other Native characters on her episodes be played by actual Native actors.

Alas, Sainte-Marie’s marriage to Jack Nitszche fell victim to his heroin addiction; in what became the final straw, he sneaked over to her and gave her a skin-pop injection of the drug. To her this was not only a betrayal of trust, it flashed her back to an early experience in the 1960’a in which she had been given injections, supposedly of “vitamins” but actually of opiates. The experience had led her to go through withdrawal and had inspired one of her most famous and most-covered songs, “Cod’ine” (though ironically a lot of the artists who covered it didn’t learn its lesson: the list of people who recorded “Cod’ine” includes such famous drug casualties as Janis Joplin and Gram Parsons). After a decade out of the music scene, Sainte-Marie got back into recording when she bought one of the first Macintosh computers in 1984 and ultimately formed a long-distance professional relationship with a producer in London. She was living in a remote area of Hawai’i and wasn’t willing to leave, but through an early version of the Internet they were able to collaborate long-distance. Today Buffy Sainte-Marie is 81 years old and still going strong; this film ends with her winning a Canadian music award in 2021. Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On is a tribute to an artist who, despite a career with more than the usual ups and downs, has made a huge contribution to the culture and succeeded on her own terms, including endowing scholarships for Native people (one of her awardees just became the principal of a Native school in Canada) and other worthy causes because she hasn’t been interested in accumulating a lot of money for herself, but instead wanted to use her money to help others.