Between my junior and senior year in high school I went with some friends to the Newport Folk Festival. According to the internet, this would have been the weekend of July 15-16, 1967. As memory would have it, I have no idea, specifically, who I went with, where I stayed, or how long I was there.
There were two events I do remember. The first was standing in a light drizzle among mostly college students and folkie aficionados listening to a singer old enough to be a grown-up but young enough to seem like me — Arlo Guthrie. He sang “Alice’s Restaurant” for an afternoon workshop. This was a premier of sorts in that I don’t think anyone had heard the song before then. There wasn’t even a stage really and I don’t recall what the title of the workshop was. Afterward, I remember walking by him as he stood alone in the mist. He looked a little lost and tired and undecided as to what to do next, his boots muddy from the wet ground. Nobody cheered or made some telling comment about the song that I remember. They did make of point of saying he was Woody’s son.
The second event was that evening when, for the first time, I saw Buffy Sainte-Marie. I knew of her — don’t know how. How do seventeen year olds know of anything? She came out on stage, she was very far away, just a petite figure, wearing a tan dress. I remember someone saying it was made of deerskin. The audience cheered wildly. It was mayhem, really, everyone shouting and clapping and yelling. So many people only a few years older than me, yet a what difference it made to a high schooler still living at home. I felt so… mature!
I found a set list online¹
Little Wheel Spin and Spin
The Piney Wood Hills
(unknown )
Cripple Creek
My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying
These songs, her voice, her dress, still sing in my memory. To put this in perspective, at the time I attended an exclusive New England prep school. No one I knew spoke of Indians, never mind Native Americans. In fact, the word native had an entirely different connotation, as when we encountered iconic indigenous personas in poems by Walt Whitman or in that seafaring novel by Herman Melville. Thinking now of these romantic depictions, I realize they had even less reality than when I was much younger. As a youngster my bike was my horse. I shot a bow and arrow. I wore chaps that my mom made for me. I carried a cap gun. I didn’t just read about cowboys and Indians, I enacted them.
Yet here at the Newport Folk Festival was Buffy Sainte-Marie, arriving from some mysterious, unknowable place.² Here was one more incredible moment in the bursting forth of song that was taking place in that time of the 1960’s. To experience the moment, be a part of it, all I had to do was buy a ticket, stand in the back, and listen.
What songs! And it was not only the mouth harp or the way the melody lay within the chords or the directness of the lyrics. It was her voice. Spine-tingling like one could actually see the sound waves emanating from her. No one else on stage. That pale tan dress, those tall white boots, her long straight black hair, a big guitar with a thick stray part of the guitar strap hanging down off the end of the guitar body like a wolf’s tail, an iconic persona come alive. The stage was littered with drum kits sitting idle and amps pushed to the back as well as a couple of mics on stands. Night had descended. Skies cleared the earlier rain. I don’t know if there were acts to follow or if she was the headliner.
The crowd was psyched. I would even go so far as to say stoned, sensually loosened, alcohol-fueled, and smattered with hallucinogens. I don’t know that for a fact for, as truly a novice, I had not had even a glass of water. I started out the concert seventeen years old. With all the initial excitement I grew a few inches and aged a bit. But as I listened to the crowd a subtle worry set in that reversed the aging process backward until I felt as if I were about twelve. I won’t say I was scared exactly. I had been outside, standing all day. I had no idea where the people I came with were. I had not eaten anything and probably was more than a little de-hydrated. One could say that I was unnerved. Something was happening and I didn’t know what it was. ( to paraphrase another song from that era )
The crowd seemed on edge. Buffy sang, but she’d talk too. People were cheering, but it was a vengeful cheer. It was a thinly veiled threatening cheer which didn’t make any sense to me.
At seventy years old today, I would express the feeling this way: For all intents and purposes, one would think they were obsessed with her in a way that, instead of celebrating her, they were bullying her to elucidate ever more outrageous atrocities in order to celebrate injustice itself.
Her last song was “My Country ’tis of Thy People You’re Dying.” I think she may have stopped after a verse or so, perhaps even gestured to walk off the stage, maybe took a few steps, but then came back. I know she stood and spoke to the crowd again. Perhaps it was the starting and stopping, the talking, the beginning to play and sing in her mesmerizing, demon scattering voice ( for a voice to scatter demons, there must be demons to scatter ) that finally revealed the crowd’s peculiar violent fury. And at that moment it was as if there was something she suddenly understood about her power against their power, a fury unleashed of which she wanted no part.
She walked off the stage.
To my teen sensibilities this was unthinkable— two outs, last inning, I’ve been striking them out all afternoon, then something inside me wonders what is the point of it all and I walk off the mound, go into the gym, take a shower, pack a bag, leave home, become a hobo… I mean, Buffy’s leaving the stage at that moment of her apparent triumph was incomprehensible!
I had no idea what was going on. Maybe she broke a string. Maybe she had a cold. But I tend not to think so. I don’t know what it meant to her but the moment changed me.
“Oh what can I do?” say a powerless few
With a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye
Can’t you see how their poverty’s profiting you?
My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying³
What catches me up now is, those are the last words of the song. Did she stop and walk away because she couldn’t bear to sing to a mob of adoring fans who could not see themselves in those very words? That her giving voice to the powerless few served only to entertain the profiting crowd? Whatever the reason, she left to find a better way.
Mildly ignored, completely known, Arlo Guthrie stood in the rain. Wildly cheered, completely unknown, Buffy Sainte-Marie walked off the stage.
A teenager’s news from the Newport Folk Festival, 1967.
¹ https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/buffy-sainte-marie/1967/festival-field-newport-ri-23fa3893.html
² In her autobiography she explained that she was adopted from a western tribe and grew up in Maine. She attended UMass Amherst for a bit, befriended Taj Mahal there. In other words, she was no poet’s creation, instead created how all poets are created, through a child’s complicated upbringing and the grace of nature’s longing to free her spirit. Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography by Andrea Warner
³ My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying by Buffy Sainte-Marie. I couldn’t find film or video for the Newport performance. You can view a wonderful rendition of the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwOyconXiGM
HinjNoiz 