Young viewers who tuned into Sesame Street during the 1975 season got a surprise when the setting abruptly changed from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico. New recurring cast member Buffy Sainte-Marie was seen taking two of the show’s regulars, Big Bird and Maria, on a tour of the Indigenous community of Taos Pueblo, and explaining that the US had many Indigenous tribes with their own languages and cultures. She then performed songs on the guitar and the mouth bow.
Shuffle forward seven years to March 1983 and Sainte-Marie is stepping up to the podium at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles to collect the Oscar for Best Original Song for ‘Up Where We Belong’, the number-one smash hit from An Officer and a Gentleman that she co-wrote with her husband Jack Nitzsche and Will Jennings.
Sainte-Marie has intersected with mass culture at various times, but her life’s work has been her powerful folk music expressing First Nations themes and firing broadsides at the structures of power. Her 1964 song ‘Now that the Buffalo’s Gone’, from her debut album It’s My Way!, concerns the oppression of Native Americans. That same album featured classic anti-war anthem ‘Universal Soldier’, which later became a hit for Glen Campbell. Her songs have been recorded by Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin and Donovan.
Considered one of the ‘Big Four’ Canadian singer-songwriters to have emerged in the 1960s coffee-house scene, alongside Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Sainte-Marie was born on a Cree Reserve in Saskatchewan and taught herself to play guitar as a teenager. By her early twenties she was touring solo across Canada and the US. A tireless campaigner and humanitarian, her most recent albums have tackled themes of the environment, conflict resolution, Indigenous realities, greed and racketeering.
Sainte-Marie's upcoming concert at City Recital Hall is an opportunity to see a truly legendary artist in an intimate setting, performing songs from a career spanning half a century.