TVD's Daily Wax | "It Came From the North"

Buffy Sainte-Marie is the Canadian singer-songwriter par-excellence. Her monumental oeuvre spans almost twenty albums, and she has won many accolades including an Academy Award for the song “Up Where We Belong.” Sainte-Marie seemed to materialize out of the plains of Saskatchewan with her natural musical talent fully formed. “To ask me about songwriting is like asking a patient to talk about a disease he was born with,” she modestly asserted. By the age of seventeen, she was already writing songs and playing the mouthbow. Legend has it that she could tune her guitar in thirty-two ways. Gaining international fame for her “songs of love and conscience,” her singing career did not bear out the early predictions by Rolling Stone Magazine that judged her as “a soprano with heavy vibrato, perhaps too eccentric to gain her mass popular acceptance.” Her tremendous vocal range runs the gamut from Baez to Joplin to Mitchell and back again, yet is always unique and deeply moving.

Sainte-Marie has ventured into rock, country, and electronica, but these projects never garnered as much success as her folk singing. Despite her willingness to embrace the new technologies afforded by digital recording, she has always had to struggle against being pigeonholed into the “Pocahontas-with-a-guitar” stereotype. Nevertheless, her political and artistic influence was so strong and threatening that President Johnson himself supported a blacklist campaign in the late 1960s to suppress her music. Forty years later, her music is still relevant: her songs have been sampled by Kayne West and she is debuting an album of original material this month.

Buffy Sainte-Marie - Sweet September Morning (Mp3)
Buffy Sainte-Marie - She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina (Mp3)
Buffy Sainte-Marie - Los Pescadores (Mp3)
Buffy Sainte-Marie - Song of the French Partisan (Mp3)
Buffy Sainte-Marie - Goodnight (Mp3)