By 1969, Native American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie was already famous as a promising and original folk singer. She was born in 1941 on an Indian reservation in western Canada. As often happened to children who came from the reservations, she was given up for adoption to a couple in Massachusetts who kept her in her studies allowing her to graduate from the University of Amherst in Eastern Philosophy.
In 1964 his debut album was released, It’s my way!, a bravely autobiographical work with songs like The incest song e Cod’ine, dedicated to her addiction to codeine, perhaps the first song to describe a withdrawal crisis. Cod’ine it is re-sung by the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan and a few years later also by Janis Joplin, with some words changed. In 2010 he also enters the Courtney Love repertoire.
Buffy Sainte-Marie, however, feels trapped by this image from “Pocahontas with the acoustic guitar” (in her own words), an exotic but reassuring image. “In the sixties they wanted me to dress like Pocahontas,” recalls the 70-year-old artist in an interview with Vogue in 2018, “but no one asked Judy Collins to dress as a pilgrim who had just landed from the Mayflower. Nobody expected Joan Baez to wear a sombrero ”.
Sainte-Marie, while identifying with her Native American origin and openly fighting for the rights of her people (so much so that she ends up on a Lyndon Johnson administration blacklist), doesn’t want to be trapped in a stereotype. Above all, she does not want to give in to the flattery of record companies who tend to sell her as yet another “girl with a guitar”.
For this reason in 1969 he decided to completely rethink his music and produced one of the most revolutionary and unjustly forgotten albums of the late sixties: Illuminations. Together with producer Maynard Solomon he invents a sound never heard before: a sort of cross between folk song and the electronic experimentation of one of the pioneers of analog synthesizers, Michael Czajkowski. Just put on the first piece, God is alive, magic is afoot, to be struck, even today, by its originality. The album starts with an alien sound that gradually becomes more and more understandable: it is the voice of Sainte-Marie which, altered by a Buchla synthesizer, seems to be composed as if from a confused puzzle to begin to declaim the lines of a Leonard Cohen poem. . They become an inspired and shamanic song that at the end returns to break down in that magma from which it came.
In 1968 it was released Switched-on Bach by electronic composer Wendy Carlos (then Walter Carlos) who had re-read some orchestral pages by Johann Sebastian Bach with a Moog modular synthesizer. It was the first classical music album to sell more than 500,000 copies and it had shown the world how many things could be done with these new, then very complicated, instruments. And when he went out Illuminations Miles Davis was working on Bitches brew, one of the first jazz albums to have realized that the recording studio and its technology could be used as a musical instrument. Miles was getting there but Buffy was already there, in this cross between tradition, esotericism and new technologies.
Illuminations it was not a folk album and it was not a rock album, in 1969 it was impossible to categorize and remains difficult to categorize even today. In a 2020 interview, Sainte-Marie recalls that her main inspiration for Illuminations they were the medieval illuminated manuscripts: “If we study these wonderful works of art, we see a very varied world of angels, demons, miracles, cruelty, martyrdom, wonders and glory. Inside there is everything but they have their own gestalt, like small worlds taken as a whole “.
Ma Illuminations it also means illuminations and every song on this album is an apparition, an epiphany. Mary begins with the sound of an organ and the voice of Mary who, seeing the star in the sky, understands that the Messiah she carries in her womb is being born: “Joseph, my time has come”, she sings with a voice that is both ecstatic and aching . In The vampire the setting becomes gothic: the protagonist of the ballad meets a man in whose eyes she cannot see herself: “Oh my little Rosary”, she sings as she gets lost in those icy eyes, “how much I miss you now, I’ve never used you as a you must and never will “.
The album ends with Poppies, which begins as a ballad in which the protagonist, a sort of ice creature, sneaks into the dreams of a person “asleep in the summer”. Here the soprano voice of Buffy Sainte-Marie merges completely with the synthesizer sound in an extraordinary play of echoes and reverbs. Then, like a distant spell, Leonard Cohen’s words that opened the album return: “God is alive and magic is afoot”, god is alive and the magic has begun.
Illuminations, when it came out, it was not understood and it was a failure that slowed down the promising career of “Pocahontas with the guitar” Buffy Sainte-Marie. Yet today it is a classic rediscovery: it is difficult to imagine To bring you my love by Pj Harvey o The dreaming by Kate Bush without this precedent that mixed folk, electronics, psychedelia and flamboyant visions between the biblical and the gothic.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Illuminations
Vanguard, 1969
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