Cameron Bailey: Please join me in welcoming to the stage the icon, the legend, Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Hey, everybody, hello Toronto!
Joe Skinner: Ahead of the Toronto International premiere of our new documentary, Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, an enthusiastic crowd of festival-goers were treated to an opening performance by Buffy Sainte-Marie herself.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Hold your hand up. Lift the top of your mind. Put your eyes on the earth. Lift your heart to your own home planet. What do you see? What is your attitude? Are you here to improve or damn it? Look, right now and you’ll see we’re only here by the skin of our teeth as it is. So take heart and take care of your link with life.
Joe Skinner: I was meeting up with Buffy to talk about the story behind the documentary’s title song “Carry It On,” which she was set to perform.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: It ain’t money that makes the world go ‘round. That’s only temporary confusion. It ain’t governments that make the people strong. It’s the opposite illusion. Look right now and you see they’re only here by the skin of their teeth as it is, so take heart and take care of your link with life – is beautiful if you got the sense to take care of your source of perfection. Mother Nature, she’s the daughter of God and the source of all protection. Look right now and you’ll see she’s only here by the skin of her teeth as it is. So take heart and take care of your link with life and carry it on, we’re saying. And carry it on and keep and carrying it on.
Joe Skinner: I’m Joe Skinner, and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. Today’s focus: Cree singer-songwriter and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, on her song “Carry It On.”
“Carry It On” is the final track in Saint-Marie’s album, Power in the Blood. It’s her 15th studio album, and it won her the Polaris Music Prize in 2015, beating Drake, among other nominees for Canada’s Top Music Award. I sat down with Buffy Sainte-Marie to learn more about her creative process and what she had to overcome in the music industry to bring this song to life.
Film Crew: PBS – Buffy Sainte-Marie interview. (clapper sound)
Joe Skinner: This is a chance to really try to unpack “Carry It On” and some context around it.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: But you do understand that I don’t remember?
Joe Skinner: That’s totally fine.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: I mean it was 1974, I can’t remember.
Musical interlude.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: A lot of people don’t know that I wrote “Carry It On” around 1974 sometime. I had a different title for it. I called it “Look at the Facts.” But then the fax machine came along. Look at the fax? This can’t be good. So I changed four words in the song. Instead of saying, “look at the facts,” I said, “look right now.” So here was a song that I had written in 1974, and the world was different then. The world was not thinking about environmental issues at all. But I had airplane tickets and concerts and fancy cities all over the world, and then I’d go to Indigenous areas in the country and I could see environmental disaster coming. Many people could. But it wasn’t in the headlines yet, and the public wasn’t aware of it. Okay, so now, years later, the world is ready for it.
Excerpt from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Carry It On.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie: “Carry It On” in terms of climate change, yeah it’s definitely right on. But it’s bigger than just climate change, it’s life itself that we’re talking about. The environment itself is not just climate and climate change. Our problems have been similar and they’ve been around for a long time, since before the old testament. Bullies are nothing new. Greedy people are nothing new. But we have survived that. The alternatives to that are nothing new. And you can be on that side, that is a thing. Greed is not the only thing. Business is not the only thing.
Joe Skinner: When you focus on its opening verses, this message in Sainte-Marie’s lyrics becomes clear.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Hold your head up. Lift the top of your mind, put your eyes on the earth. Lift your heart to your own home planet, what do you see? What is your attitude? Are you here to improve or damn it? Look right and see we are only here by the skin of our teeth as it is – so take heart. And take care of your link with life – it ain’t money that makes the world go ‘round.
Joe Skinner: It makes sense to me that Buffy Sainte-Marie first wrote the original lyrics to “Carry It On” in 1974. She was only in her early 30’s, but by then she was a veteran singer-songwriter. She had already seen the ugly side of the music industry, and had plenty of reasons to question the capitalist enterprise altogether. These challenges had all started around 10 years earlier, when she’d written one of her first hits – one that would become an iconic anti-war song of the 1960s.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: I had to stop in San Francisco airport overnight and just stay there in the airport and wait for a morning flight. And in the middle of the night, here came soldiers, medics, and they were wheeling wounded soldiers into San Francisco airport. And we had been being told that there was no war in Vietnam. And I got to talking to one of the medics who was just horrified to know that we were being told that there was no war. You know, he kind of outlined what had been going on and I didn’t see him again and I had the rest of the night and I wrote a song called “Universal Soldier.”
Excerpt from “Universal Soldier”: He’s the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame. His orders come from far away no more. They come from him and you and me and brothers can’t you see? This is not the way we put an end to war.
Joe Skinner: Sainte-Marie had been performing “Universal Soldier” in Greenwich Village at the Gaslight Cafe. The Highwaymen heard it and wanted to record the song. Her manager at the time knew a guy at the next table over, who convinced her to sell the publishing rights to the song – for one dollar. It would take 10 years for Sainte-Marie to buy back a piece of those rights – for 15,000 dollars of her own money. To quote her biographer Andrea Warner, “Buffy Sainte-Marie is an indigenous icon whose name belongs alongside the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. But she is an Indigenous woman living in a society shaped by genocide and colonization.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Oh, you had no power at all. Blue Note wanted to sign me – they’re a jazz label. And Vanguard wanted to sign me. So I chose Vanguard. I went to the Vanguard offices. They said, “oh, here’s your contract. Where’s your lawyer?” I said, “I don’t have one of those.” And they said, “okay, you can use ours.” Total conflict of interest. So I signed up for seven years and they put out albums that were outtakes. When I went in to record, it was a big ballroom and here I was standing all by myself – a girl and a guitar, right? Looking at a bunch of businessmen. I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know one person in the room. I sang my song a couple of times. And they just put it out and that was it. You didn’t have any power.
Joe Skinner: Through the sixties, Sainte-Marie slogged through a tense relationship with her first record company, Vanguard, who never seemed to quite know what to do with her music.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: They never knew where to put me. Nothing went together. I’ve always been all over the place, and that’s just what pops into my head. The sixties was kind of funny. It seems like it was very expansive and embracing and freeing, but actually it was kind of narrow-minded. I mean, when I got there, [everything] was supposed to be like Pete Seeger and be singing Woody Guthrie songs – which were wonderful. But they were just one way. It was basically the American Songbook.
Joe Skinner: Buffy Sainte-Marie certainly was not declaring allegiance to the American Songbook during this time. Despite her struggles with Vanguard, you can still hear her innovative mindset power through on many of her releases – like on “Illuminations,” her 1969 album that featured experimental new synthesizers and quadraphonic audio:
Excerpt from “God is Alive Magic is Afoot.”
Joe Skinner: Many of the songs from early in her career have gone on to popular and cult acclaim. But it would take time and experience for Sainte-Marie to overcome the business side of the industry.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: A lot of us just kind of sat there while everybody else just made a bundle of money. Business so often has been, “take as much as you can get and give the least you can,” and it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s just an old-fashioned model. That’s the pecking order that came down from Europe. Art can have a great power to make change, but business can defeat that, can dilute it. People, they think they understand money, but in doing so, they’ve forgotten how to understand people, how to be human, how to be kind, how to make it work for everybody. But you know what? We made a lot of great music. We made some changes. Some of us are still here, and as for me, I’m very grateful. You have to let go of carrying around grudges like a bag of rocks. You can put that down. We can’t get discouraged. We have to keep on keeping on.
Joe Skinner: As the decades passed, Buffy Sainte-Marie has built a space for herself to make the kind of music she wants to make, and has earned her place in music history. Her 1965 song, “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” has been covered 157 times since its release, most notably by Elvis Presley. In 1983, she became the first Indigenous person to win an Academy Award – when her song “Up Where We Belong,” co-written for the film, An Officer and a Gentleman – won for Best Original Song. So by the time of her 2015 album Power in the Blood, Buffy Sainte-Marie was able to exert more creative freedom than ever before into her work. It makes sense that the album’s final song, “Carry It On,” has developed into what it is now.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: There’s a lot more of the real me in my records now than there could have been back then, where I had no say.
Excerpt from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Carry It On.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie: You know, it’s really kind of uplifting and medicinal. It’s like a medicine song.
Excerpt from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Carry It On.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie: It was more fun than any record I’ve ever made. I went into my basement studio and I recorded a whole bunch of demos of the songs that I wanted to do. I interviewed seven producers. I loved three of them. So all three producers received my demos and I said, “choose the ones you want.” I had control of the seed itself, you know, not just the song, but I sang it into my own – into my own microphone, and I got it as far as I could take it. I’m a terrible bass player, so I always had to replace myself. But, you know, I got the idea across to the producers and then they took it from there.
Joe Skinner: So which producer worked on “Carry It On?”
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Jon Levine. We had never met each other. We both showed up at the Orange Room studio in Toronto and we got to work and he had hired Max Kennedy Roach, who was just a fierce drummer and Justin Abedin for electric and acoustic guitars. And Jon himself was playing keyboards and programming additional drums, and it was just fun. Jon… He got the music and it was quite new to him. I don’t think he was real familiar with me. You know, he makes hits and he’s a great jazz artist. He didn’t know anything about powwow and of course, “Carry It On” has powwow at the end.
Joe Skinner: For listeners that might not know what powwow music is, how would you define it?
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Just imagine you were on a reserve and you’re at a powwow and there’ll be a group of singers, often men, sitting down. Each person has their own beater, their own drumstick, big drum, like a bass drum. Often there are women singers. Standing around the edge – [that] is a traditional way to do it – and everybody sings at the same time. The songs might be old and traditional, or they may be new powwow songs. I have racks and racks and racks of powwow records. In the Americas, Indigenous people know about powwow music, and it’s very, very beautiful. Every powwow singer and I – we all know that Buffy’s not a powwow singer, but I’m influenced and dearly love powwow music, and often I sing something I call powwow pop.
Excerpt from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Star Walker.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie: It was 1975 that I made the first powwow rock song called “Star Walker.”
Excerpt from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Star Walker”: Star walker is a friend of mine. You’ve seen him looking fine.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: And people had not used Indigenous music in pop records before. And I always thought that if people only heard powwow music incorporated into songs that they already liked, you know, in forms that are really easily digestible, it’s like adding an ingredient of cooking. It just makes it different. Unique. Better. Delicious. Yeah. I always wanted to cover the base that nobody else was covering, which in my case was Indigenous stuff. And I really wanted to give that gift to the rest of the world, not just as an activist, but as someone who is sharing with people who don’t know and might want to know.
Joe Skinner: At the very end of “Carry It On,” Sainte-Marie returns to her idea of powwow pop and a traditional melody to go with it.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: A little bit of a traditional melody that many people think of as the AIM song, The American Indian Movement. Just the song we always sang together. So most people think of it as the AIM song.
Joe Skinner: The American Indian Movement was a 1968 grassroots movement initially founded to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against Native Americans. Buffy was a part of these efforts.
Buffy Sainte-Marie: It is basically (performs traditional vocalization). You know it’s longer than that. But that’s the idea of it. And I just felt like singing it. It doesn’t have anything to do with reading and writing music. I just hear it in my head. It’s the dream side of the brain.
Excerpt from Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Carry It On.”
Buffy Sainte-Marie: “Carry it On,” at the end is a very important statement in the chorus. It says, “keep on playing, keep on playing.” Music for me as a child, I was playing. Every little kid is banging on pots and pans, playing a little xylophone, playing a ukulele, because it’s fun. And then as soon as they get to school, you can’t play anymore. And that’s what everybody needs. We all need to play. I mean, play like you played basketball before you had a career in basketball. Keep your nose on the joy trail. I mean, sniff out the positivity in life instead of reading horror comics. I just like to leave people with a sense of energy, hope, power that they can survive life. There are so many things out there that are available that you don’t hear about because you can’t get through the salesmen who are selling brands. You know, there’s health out there. There’s good food out there. There’s good air out there that we could be encouraging, but not all of us are. There are ideas out there. There are good people you can meet. You can always find new friends. There’s so much medicine out there and and “Carry It On” just kind of sums all that up. So that’s why I close to that, I wanted to leave people with a sense of “Yes!” Human triumph. The triumph of life.
Joe Skinner: Thank you to Buffy Sainte-Marie for her interview, and for letting us into her creative process and inspiration. There is so much more to know about Buffy, so please check out our documentary, American Masters – Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On. If you’re listening to this today, November 22nd, you can watch it tonight nationwide on PBS at 9pm eastern time, check local listings. You can also stream it on pbs.org/americanmasters, and on the PBS video app.
We’ll be back in the New Year with a whole new season of the podcast, so please, subscribe and tell your friends about the show, and rate and review it in your favorite app.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and the Philip & Janice Levin Foundation.
