Original-Cin Interview: Buffy Sainte-Marie Comes to TIFF Where She Belongs

It’s 10:30 a.m. in Hawaii and Buffy Sainte-Marie is graciously hosting me in her cozy mountain home via Zoom. She’s been up since 5 a.m., as is her habit, and usually fills that time feeding the “goats and kitties” and “making coffee for my sweetheart.”

Today, however, she’s also doing interviews to promote Madison Thomas’s documentary Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, which debuts Sept. 8 as an opening day feature of the Toronto International Film Festival.

It is a busy doc that squeezes, into 90 minutes, a life of activism, flashbacks to the folkie era, self-discovery, hard life-lessons, sometimes absurd controversy (did you know she was the first person to nurse on U.S. TV, when she breast-fed her son on Sesame Street?). Add to that the stories behind the hits (Universal Soldier, Until It’s Time for You to Go, Up Where We Belong, etc.).

Buffy and the band.

And the 81-year-old Sainte-Marie is busy in turn. Those who’ve seen her onstage lately have experienced rocking, electric performances, punctuated by self-effacing humour. (Those who haven’t can see her perform on a free stage on King Street before Thursday’s film debut.)

And from there, she moves on to the Celebration of Nations in St. Catharines for a performance Saturday. Funnily enough, her work ethic might go unnoticed behind the Do Not Disturb sign on her hotel door. “When I’m home, people in Canada think I like to sleep in, because I wake up at noon,” she says. “But that’s because I always stay on Hawaiian time.”

Almost everything about Buffy Sainte-Marie seems improbable in retrospect, an orphaned Cree from Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, raised in New England in an often-abusive home.

“My adoptive mom was part Mi'kmaq – only they called it ‘MickMack’ in those days,” she says wryly. “This was Maine and Massachusetts, very much Pilgrim types. The people running things would all claim that they had descended from the Mayflower. Everybody else was an also-ran and there certainly weren’t any more Indians.”

“I was told I couldn’t be an Indian because there weren’t any. And I was told in music class I couldn’t be a musician, because I couldn’t read music.

“But music and musicians existed before someone in Europe decided to write it down. Music itself happened before then. We are made in the image of the Creator. What does that mean? It means we’re creative.”

“For me, creativity is like dreaming. When you go to bed at night, you don’t know that you’re going to dream, let alone what you’re going to dream about. I wake up and there’s a song in my head. I don’t know where it came from.

“So, when people ask me what my (songwriting) process is, I say, ‘It’s kind of like having to pee.’”

It’s not the first time Sainte-Marie has made me laugh. At a performance a few years ago at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, she introduced Up Where We Belong, her hit from An Officer and a Gentleman that was covered by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. “They gave me an Oscar for this song,” she said, “And they didn’t even make me sing it.”

It had me thinking, considering the serious causes she has spent a lifetime supporting – anti-war, anti-racism – is laughter empowering?

“Sometimes. I noticed even in the documentary that I have a laugh that comes up during sad things too. It’s a ‘What’re you gonna do?’ kind of humour.

“Sometimes, if you have a brain like mine, you can see a different facet or side of things. And so often, most of us who experience it will go, ‘What a world!’ and maybe laugh out of frustration.”

Wondering what else to see at TIFF? Check out Original-Cin’s Wish-List

Her activism was no laughing matter to the likes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Presidents Johnson and Nixon, who furtively and actively discouraged radio stations from playing her music (something she only discovered later in life).

Why do the powers-that-be so often fear artists? “Because we have a voice,” she says. “Those people have to pay for that voice and win elections. We just show up and sparkle. I mean, do you want to look at me or Joe Biden?”

“You, a hundred per cent,” I tell her.

“I’m glad you didn’t have to think about it,” she says with a laugh.

Seeing her shred her guitar at a folk festival put me in mind of Bob Dylan getting booed for going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Sainte-Marie trod the same path as Dylan for a while, getting written up in the New York Times as she was playing Greenwich Village Coffee Houses.

Did she ever get booed for changing course? “Not in the way it happened with Bob Dylan. For me it was different. I made the first-ever totally electronic vocal album called Illuminations in the ‘60s. Electronic music students, art students, music schools, they were intrigued. (The album continues to have a cult following, and is credited with inspiring other electronica and even goth. A particular highlight is her take on Leonard Cohen’s lyric God is Alive, Magic is Afoot).

“So far as different genres go, Jim, I think it’s kind of like having a radio in your head, and somebody’s spinning the dial. It might be bluegrass, delta blues, a pop love song, protest. I love all kinds of music.”

Moreover, the folk/protest scene often disappointed her, so moving on was no loss. “Now and then I see there's something missing, and I try to fix it with the tools I have. During the Vietnam War, popular songs were asking stuff like 'Where have all the flowers gone?’ and saying, 'the answer was blowing in the wind.’

“But nobody was actually proposing our individual responsibility for war - soldiers, politicians and civilians who vote. Hell, without soldiers, even Caesar would've stood alone. So, I wrote Universal Soldier.

“None of my peers in show business knew about residential schools or other Indigenous issues, so I covered that base in various songs.”

Songwriters will often refuse to name favourite songs, usually comparing it to naming a favourite child. Sainte-Marie is willing to name two. Starwalker, from the 1976 album Sweet America, is “the first powwow rock song,” in her estimation, with lyrics that evoke real people. “Some names I used are real people. Thunderchild is a famous Saskatchewan chief. Holy Light is the grand-uncle of my son’s dad. So, Sheldon Wolfchild’s dad’s brother was Holy Light.”

The other is Until It’s Time for You to Go, a song she says makes her, “(laugh) in amazement at the assortment of artists who’ve covered it. Unbelievable! Not just Elvis and Barbra, and Willie Nelson and Roberta Flack and Chet Atkins. But Mel Gibson? Bette Davis? Kanye West? That's pretty exciting!”

Elvis’s “people” wanted a cut of the publishing rights if The King were to record the song. Sainte-Marie, who’d learned her lesson having to buy back the rights to Universal Soldier, drew the line. “It wasn’t Elvis. It was his business people. Elvis was on my side.

“I mean, I was a huge Elvis fan. When I was 13 and he was 19 he was all there was in the world. For years, I had a crush on him.

“Grover Washington, Chet Atkins, Roberta Flack, everybody kind of likes that melody. Chet Atkins told me in the ‘60s, ‘You know Buffy, you wrote a standard.’

“Chet was a wonderful person, I just loved him. I remember one time my asking him about my not reading music, and he said, ‘You know what I tell people when they ask me if I read music?’

“And I said, ‘No Chet, what?’

“He said, ‘Not enough to hurt my playing.’”

The Celebration of Nations speaks to another facet of Sainte-Marie’s life. She connected with her Cree heritage in her teens, but has also been embraced by other Indigenous cultures. “A lot of people don’t appreciate that First Nations has an S at the end of it,” I say.

“Y’know,” she says, “in making a documentary, the problem is what you leave out. And there could be a whole movie about what you’ve just said.

“I’ve worked with Sami people in Norway, 30 degrees north of the Arctic circle. These are reindeer herders, they have tipis very much like ours. I’ve taken part in Indigenous festivals all over the place, in New Zealand and Australia, and in Japan, the Innu people.

“I remember one indigenous festival in Sweden, and Southern European journalists all come up for the Midnight Sun. People wearing lederhosen and little else. And there was a scrum set up for the journalists to talk to the Indigenous people who came from everywhere - Philippines, Africa, everyplace. And the question one of the journalists asked was, ‘How come Indigenous people have so much in common? We (Europeans) don’t even like each other all that much.’

“One of the answers was, ‘It’s because we sit our bottoms on Mother Earth. It’s a kind of natural telepathy,’” she says with a laugh.

Sainte-Marie’s oeuvre includes music, children’s books, art (she has a digital art show currently being mounted in Ottawa). Has she ever heard the patronizing phrase, “Stay in your lane?”   

“I don’t have a lane,” she says, laughing. “I’m not even on the highway!”