Interview: Buffy Sainte-Marie - 'I'm not interested in being hip so much as being effective …I wanted to change things, not just be a loudmouth complaining'

Published on Wednesday 8 July 2009 19:02

BUFFY Sainte-Marie may not be a household name, but she means many different things to many different people.

She's the songwriter who won an Oscar for Up Where We Belong; who, on one hand, penned the protest anthem Universal Soldier, which became a hit for Donovan, but also wrote the tender love ballad, Until It's Time For You To Go, recorded by Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, Bobby Darin, Roberta Flack and Cher among others.

A mixed-blood Cree Indian, she has been a lifelong campaigner for native American Indian rights. She is also a digital artist, who designs her own album covers, and an unsung pioneer of electronic and digital music. Her 1969 album Illuminations was the first-ever synthesiser vocal record and, while making her Coincidence And Likely Stories album more than two decades later, she was among the first to exploit this new-fangled thing called the Internet, by sending her home-recorded music files down a modem line to her producer. Oh, and she also taught a generation of American kids about breast-feeding on Sesame Street.

Her new album, Running For The Drum, is her first new release in over 15 years. "When I decide to make an album, it really has nothing to do with the music industry," she says. "It just means that I'm willing to tour."

Sainte-Marie has always defied any stereotyping as "Pocahontas with a guitar". Although the album features tribal stomps about land rights and her native American take on America The Beautiful, it also encompasses pop ballads, folk songs, smoky jazz croons and southern rhythm'n'blues. As ever, her lyrics switch comfortably between the sweetly emotional and the stridently political.

Born in 1941 (she thinks) on a Cree reservation in Qu'appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Sainte-Marie was adopted as a young girl and brought up in Maine and Massachusetts. Her earliest memory is seeing a piano for the first time. "I just went over and played with it, like a ball or a Barbie doll," she recalls.

Later, she bought her first guitar from a pawn shop and starting making up her own tunes. The distinctive approach which came naturally to her was only recently diagnosed as musical dyslexia. "When I was in school, the thing they called music class was just a horror for me," she says. "I couldn't understand what the notation had to do with music."

However, she flourished in the less constrained setting of the university campus, alongside contemporaries such as bluesman Taj Mahal. After graduating in the early 60s, she planned to further her studies in India but set off first for a weekend in New York, armed with her guitar. Her reception in the clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village changed the course of her life. Her debut album was an instant success at a time when politicised songwriters were the big new noise, although she never felt entirely connected to the scene which spawned Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Judy Collins.

"I don't drink alcohol so I didn't hang out afterhours at the bars and that's where business was done and that's where the social networking was happening," she says.

Instead, Sainte-Marie set off to tour the States and beyond on her own, often playing gigs on Indian reservations. Although she settled in Hawaii in the mid-60s, where she still lives on a farm with her partner and her goats, she continued to seek out and speak out for indigenous communities wherever she played.

She was rewarded for her awareness-raising efforts by being blacklisted back home, first by the Johnson administration in the 60s, who objected to her involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement, then by Nixon for her native rights activism.

"I was literally gagged in the US and audiences could not hear me," she says. "If I was invited on to a TV show, I was told that it was now unfashionable to talk about issues. But I'm not interested in being hip so much as being effective. I wanted to change things, not just be a loudmouth complaining about things."

She found herself an unusual alternative platform in the mid-70s by joining the regular cast of Sesame Street along with her then husband Sheldon Wolfchild and their young son Cody, where they gently explored family life and ethnic identity with Big Bird, Grover and all the gang. "I really wanted the country to understand that Indian people still exist, that we're not stuffed with the dinosaurs in some museum. Nobody expects white people to dress like pilgrims but they always think Indian people are going to be the same as we were in the 1700s. I wanted to reach little kids and their care-givers before stereotyping ever came in."

She continues her educational work through the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an aboriginal studies programme for kids of all ages, and she campaigned for Barack Obama, focusing on the issue of voter protection for brown minorities. "I didn't campaign for him because he came from my home state or because he's half black," she says. "For me, it's important that he's a professor of constitutional law and a community worker. I think he's the most qualified person ever to be in the White House. Things are looking up in many ways but there's so much work still to be done and so much mischief to be undone."

&#149 Running For The Drum is out now on Cooking Vinyl Records. Buffy Sainte-Marie plays the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on 28 July and the Cambridge Folk Festival on 31 July