Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie, OC (formerly Beverly Sainte-Marie; born 1941) is a Native Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist,educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism.....

By 1962, in her early twenties, she was touring alone, developing her craft and performing in various concert halls, folk music festivals and Native Americans reservations across the United States, Canada and abroad. She spent a considerable amount of time in the coffeehouses of downtown Toronto's old Yorkville district, and New York City's Greenwich Village as part of the early to mid-1960s folk scene, often alongside other emerging Canadian contemporaries, such as Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. (Read more at Wikipedia) *

Links to Peel
Peel may well have been aware of Buffy Sainte-Marie during his years in the United States, as her songs were recorded by other artists, notably Donovan, whose cover of her "Universal Soldier" was a chart success. But in 1968 he surprised his Top Gear listeners by enthusing over her "I'm Gonna Be A Country Girl Again" LP, and wrote in International Times:


 * Buffy Sainte-Marie was given a rough time by the jackboot generation when she was over here recently which is one of the great sadnesses as she may never return. I know many people think country and western stuff is a drag but her "I'm going to ba a country girl again" is so beautiful. Don't close yourself to anything because that is what we're all up against anyway. It's on Vanguard and "Top Gear" and can be found at One Stop (of course) and Musicland. Possibly others also.

The LP was eventually released in the UK by Fontana Records, as was the singer's follow-up album, the experimental "Illuminations", which used synthesizers and is climed to be the first quadrophonic vocal album ever made. Peel liked Buffy Sainte-Marie's setting of a Leonard Cohen text, "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot", and played it a few times on his shows. He had some sympathy for the singer because of her Native American background and played her single "Soldier Blue" from the film of the same name, a "revisionist Western" which portrayed the massacre of an Indian tribe. The single and film were both hits in the UK, but not in the US. tbc

Sessions

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Other Shows Played
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 * DD Month YYYY: Song (single/album) Label