Folk Singers: Solitary Indian

She is a little girl lost behind a battered big-bellied guitar. Her dusky face, framed by a cascade of raven hair that spills across her shoulders and down toher waist, seems frozen in mournful repose. In a throaty voice edged with anguish, she sings some of the unlikeliest lyrics ever heard in a nightclub: But where in the history books is the tale Of genocide basic to this country’s birth, Of the preachers who lied, How the Bill of Rights failed?

Then, with a shy hint of a smile, she says to the audience: “I hope you’re offended.”

They are not; they are captivated. All week long, listeners packed into the Main Point coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, Pa., to hear Folk Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. In a trade plagued by imitators studiously imitating each other, Buffy Sainte-Marie is uniquely herself. To begin with, she is a full-blooded Cree Indian. As such, she grew up a moody loner in a white man’s world, she took lessons from no one, listened to no records, has had little truck with the chummy folk fraternity. She writes her own songs, and at 23 she is the most intriguing young folk singer to emerge in many a moon.

Up the Spine. Buffy’s protest songs are strictly personal. She is not interested in Viet Nam or the Bomb, but in Uncle Sam’s treatment of the Indian. But protest is not her only pitch, and she has other things on her mind that any non-Indian can share. What fires her songs with feeling is the peculiarly husky timbre and flexibility of her voice. She can purr, she can belt, she can shade her voice with an eerie tremble that crawls up the listener’s spine. Unlike the pure, mountain-spring soprano of Joan Baez and her disciples. Buffy’s lowdown treatment is aged in brine, her repertory more varied. In Until It’s Time for You to Go she is a tender young thing reflecting on affairs of the heart. In Cod’ine, which she wrote after a harrowing bout with the drug while being treated for bronchitis, she is an aged harpie whining: “My belly’s cravin’, I’ve got a shakin’ in my head.”

Orphaned as a baby, she was adopted by a Micmac Indian couple—a mechanic and his proofreader wife—and raised in Wakefield, Mass. Her summers were spent in a trailer on the shores of Sebago Lake, Me. It was there as a teenager, wandering alone through the forest, that she began to compose. She taught herself to play the guitar “all backwards,” inventing her own finger patterns and “32 different tunings, which account for the strange flavor of my music.” With the aid of a Government loan, she entered the University of Massachusetts, studied Oriental philosophy and elementary education. An honor student, she graduated in 1963 and went to Manhattan, sat in on a hootenanny at a Greenwich Village folk den, was immediately offered a recording contract and nightclub dates.

Lonq Chill. Buffy now commands up to $2,500 a concert and hopes “to help correct the image of the Indian as someone who is chased across the movie screen or sits in his rocking chair watching his oil wells.” She frequently visits the Pyepot Indian Reserve, home of her tribe in Saskatchewan. Canada, recently returned from a four-month “recuperative leave” on an island off the coast of Spain, where she finished a concerto for guitar and orchestra and worked on an opera.

Now she is readying herself for the rigors of a long winter’s tour—and the chill of discrimination. “Some people don’t like girls whose eyes slant and whose skin is different looking,” she says resignedly, “but I just wish they would kick me out of their hotels before I’ve unpacked my bags.”