In the song “Indian Cowboy,” Midnite Ethelbah, lead singer of the band Apache Spirit, delivers one of the more famous lines in contemporary Native American country music: “I don’t know how it happened, but I’m feeling kind of glad / I’m an Indian cowboy, and being both can’t be so bad.”1 The rhythm of the couplet’s second line is perfectly timed to coincide with the chorus’s V-I, E-to-A musical resolution, along with the bass line that walks up to the signature guitar riff that frames each of the song’s verses. It is the kind of seamless blending of country-and-western form and Native American content that has made Apache Spirit a Native American Music Award–winning band, among the best-known performers of contemporary Native American music today.
How can this be? By what magical process can Anglo-American country music come to sonically represent Indians as well? How can the sounds of white, hardscrabble, blue-collar, evangelical Christian, sometimes racist ideologies be embraced by the very people against whom those ideologies have often been so destructively employed? For anyone who has ever seen a western movie where the Indians are brought to crushing devastation in order to make room for the cowboys and their cattle, the musical image must be jarring in spite of—or perhaps because of—its presentation of stylistic concord. What episode of The Twilight Zone is this? How can Indians sing cowboy music? Are they for real?
These obvious and undeniable contradictions may lead some people to dismiss Indian country singing as hopelessly assimilated. How can any self-respecting Native American get pleasure from these musical sounds so closely associated with the usurpers of their culture and history? Are they Indians at all, or are they just out of their minds?
I have caricatured them a bit, but these are the kinds of questions I hear from students, especially teaching in the Northeast, where an “eclectic” global taste in music is often further specified as “I listen to everything but country.” But the relationship between cowboys and Indians has always been complicated. Neither the cowboy nor the Indian can escape a history of media representations—from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows to Washington-versus-Dallas football games—that have caricatured them and placed them side by side on the same stage. Neither are these images limited to the sideshows of “least-common-denominator” entertainments. Chic “Southwest-style” fashion performs a similar task, using more sophisticated means. One high-end western lifestyle magazine calls itself Cowboys and Indians, and features ads for designer fashion boots and silver jewelry, as well as columns on building “your Western and Native American art collection.” As Michael Martin Murphey sings in his song “Cherokee Fiddle,” “Now the Indians are dressing up like cowboys / And the cowboys are putting leather and turquoise on.”
Despite country music’s associations with white working-class life-ways, country performers as well sometimes trade on the possibility of a Native American heritage. Hank Williams claimed to be part Creek and Cherokee, and has been inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame, as has Crystal Gayle (Cherokee). Ten years ago, Canadian country star Shania Twain caused some controversy when she supposedly claimed that she was part Ojibwa.2 And for years Johnny Cash allowed rumors of his supposed Cherokee heritage to circulate in the media, finally coming clean in a 1975 interview with Larry Linderman, who asked, “A number of press reports have stated you’re part Cherokee. Are you?” Cash replied, “No, I have no Indian ancestry. Some folks have said I do, but I can’t find it anywhere—and I’ve got my family tree. Of course, when I used to get high, well, the higher I got, the more Indian blood I thought I had in me. And a lot of people wanted me to be part Indian, especially after I recorded the Bitter Tears album” (Streissguth 2002: 153).3
Cash’s mentioning his 1964 Bitter Tears recording, a collection of songs shedding much-needed light on a number of Native American political issues, raises another set of complications about country music. The genre is so closely associated with working-class southern white aesthetics in the minds of many listeners—accurately or not (see Ivey 1998, Malone 1985, and Peterson 1997 on the mixture of blues and country in the early twentieth century, and the commercial decisions that led to a separation of “race” and “hillbilly” genre categories in the marketing of recorded music)—that it is difficult to imagine anyone other than working-class whites deriving any pleasure or meaning from the sounds of the music. Timothy D. Taylor (2007) has observed that Bitter Tears is the only country recording included in the two-volume Rough Guide to World Music. This absence not only flies in the face of dozens of Native American country performers who sing their lives through its musical conventions but also reveals how marginalized the sounds of country music can be in the ears of even sophisticated and open-minded listeners. This silence has often included professional ethnomusicologists, a topic I will return to in a later section.
Given this multiplicity of contexts and crossings, when it comes to Indian country singing, asking, “How can this be?” is an alienating question. It treats the subject of the question as something completely beyond the possible experience of the person asking. Yet it may be that we all have experiences of loving deeply music that is arguably beyond our cultural experience—Renaissance madrigals, Balkan gangas, Motown, salsa, sitars, swing. Why are Native Americans singled out as needing to resist these same circulating influences in order to convince non-Indians that they are who they claim to be? The question about Indians and country music is not simply about the anomalies of that particular combination. Those anomalies are read through dominant historical ideologies about what a proper expression of Native identity should be.
And so we might instead turn to another question that is at the heart of a great deal of contemporary Native American musical expression. Despite increasing concern for, involvement in, and resurgence of musical practices that can be claimed as “traditional,” a core question about contemporary Native American musical practice in cultural context today is, “What counts as culture?” In this chapter I want to explore some possibilities for thinking about country music as an important way that Native American songwriters and performers give voice to contemporary issues of indigenous culture, history, and identity. I have divided the chapter into two broad sections. In the first, I will discuss the historical and cultural forces that have created a context for Native country performers. In the second, I will explore some of the musical and textual processes by which Native performers make country music meaningful within that historical and cultural context.
In beginning to grapple with the relationship of country music to the voicing of these historical and political concerns, we immediately come up against a crucial feature of contemporary Native American music making: Native performers are extremely eclectic in their sources and influences. In his work on contemporary music in indigenous communities around the world, Martin Stokes has written of these eclectic stylistic choices: “Musicians in many parts of the world have a magpie attitude towards genres, picked up, transformed and reinterpreted in their own terms” (1994: 16). This means that few Native country singers perform in the country genre exclusively. Like country music itself, their styles reveal influences from across the southern swath of the West, extending from Tennessee and Kentucky to Louisiana and California—rhythm and blues, Louisiana “swamp pop” (Bernard 1996), Texas swing, and Mexican border polkas. Like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette, Elvis Presley, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison, Tanya Tucker, Conway Twitty, or Buddy Holly, they owe as much to rock-and-roll as they do country-and-western. When I did my fieldwork on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, I learned that a number of country performers were inspired to learn guitar by California surf music, especially by the release of the play-along album Play Guitar with the Ventures (1965). And a great many country performers were influenced by such country-rock hybrid crossover bands of the ’60s and ’70s as the Byrds and the Eagles.
This generic eclecticism is combined with a varying embrace of the key generic markers of country singing. A love of country music among Native performers and songwriters does not automatically mean that the defining features of country music are simply copied verbatim. For example, many Native country singers do not fully appropriate all aspects of country music vocal style in their performances. Only a few singers, for instance, incorporate the sonic features of the Appalachian, Ozark, and mountain South dialect of American English into their pronunciations when they sing, despite the importance of the sounds of that vocal style to the performance of mainstream country (Feld et al. 2004). The Fenders, one of the earliest country groups from the Navajo Nation, at times sang heartfelt renditions of country songs without a hint of any save their own local Navajo-English dialects. Similarly, very few bands incorporate fiddles or pedal steel guitars into their instrumental textures.
And so we have to recognize a variety of legacies, as well as varying commitments to unreservedly embrace a country music aesthetic. This means that the relationship between Native country singers and country music is by no means simple. There are many layers and levels of engagement with country music displayed by Indian country singers. Listening to a political activist such as Floyd Red Crow Westerman singing “Custer Died for Your Sins” or “They Didn’t Listen” to the accompaniment of a pedal steel guitar, it is tempting to think that this must all be ironic—that an Indian must sing country with tongue firmly in cheek. And there is that. But irony is not the only way in which Native Americans are politically and creatively engaged with the sounds and forms of country music. Although the Fenders do not perform the sonic markers of white “redneck” southernness in their singing voices, this is not completely a matter of ironic detachment from country music. The members of WigWam, a country band from northern Ontario, compose and sing all their songs in their native language, Anishinabe. The group’s full-on country arrangements and style act as the musical bed for these songs of cultural history and identity. The late Buddy Red Bow adopted a fluent country style to sing about Lakota history, culture, and hard times on the Pine Ridge Reservation, often blending his compositions with an array of New Age sounds and excerpts of Pow-wow Grass dance songs as well. In this wide variety of artistic engagements with country style, rarely is the “purity” of the country music genre at stake—if such a thing exists to begin with.
What, then, is at stake? Taking note of the abundance of style mixing in contemporary Native American country music, we might rethink the kinds of questions we ask about it. “Why” questions can be asked in ways that imply different kinds of underlying questions. The sense that there is a contradiction at work here is strong, and so the “why” question is sometimes taken to mean, “How could Indians possibly sing country songs? How could this be?” That version of the question asks us only to focus on the sense of contradiction involved. It puts the pieces that make up Native American country music at irreconcilable odds with each other, and then wonders how these jigsaw puzzle pieces could ever have been thought to fit together. But there is another version of the question that can encourage us to think about how contradiction produces expressive artistry.4
The first version of the question offers little way out, and can lead to frustration. One way of resolving that frustration has been for people to hold onto the idea that it is the Indian things that are added to a country song—native instruments, native vocables, native vocal styles—that make it Native, as if a real Indian couldn’t simply love a mainstream hard-country artist (Ching 2003) like Merle Haggard, George Jones, or Hank Williams and mean it. But my experience on the San Carlos Apache Reservation contradicts this. Everyone I knew on the San Carlos reservation knew and loved hard-country standards such as Merle Haggard’s “Branded Man” and George Jones’s “Open Pit Mine,” and could sing them by heart. I once heard an entire audience sing Haggard’s “Silver Wings” in unison as the band played it. One man in San Carlos mused that if there were a collection of Johnny Horton’s greatest hits, every adult on the reservation would own a copy.5 And the great Canadian country singer Ernest Monias has recorded a sixteen-song album, Tribute to Hank Williams. Moreover, as I noted earlier, Hank Williams is in the Native American Music Hall of Fame.
Finding the “meaning” of a song amid this array of artistic influences, debts, and crossings is daunting. We will not be able to locate the entirety of a song’s meaning within the “song itself”—certainly not within the most popular commercial recording of a song. Rather, we must think about the dynamic relationship between songs, performers, and audiences as a necessary feature of musical meaning—or any meaning taken in its sense of a fully social, cultural production (Duranti and Brenneis 1986). It is something of a truism to say that artists do not control the meanings that audiences will take away from their work. But truism or not, this will be a key to making sense of what is initially striking as the contradiction of American Indian country singing.
The productive engagement of the audience in the creation of social meaning is crucial to understanding contemporary cultural expression. It may be even more central in the case of a musical style such as country, which has depended so heavily on the technologies of mass mediation— especially radio and records—for the spread of its popularity (Jensen 1998; Peterson 1997). Although the notion of performer-audience relations is commonplace when one thinks about live performances, it may seem like a bit of an anomaly to consider the audience when discussing massmediated music heard on radio and records. But the response to mediated performances involves the social imagination precisely because they are linked to private, individual, and social responses to experiences of music. Boe Titla, a singer-songwriter on the San Carlos reservation, told me that when he was in high school, he and his friends would rush home every afternoon to listen to the thirty minutes of country music broadcast by a local station in Safford, Arizona. Many people in Boe’s hometown of Bylas owned battery-operated transistor radios to listen to music even before their homes were wired for electricity. Those high school days were when Boe fell under the spell of George Jones. When Boe began writing his own songs about important places and events in the history of the San Carlos Apache people, he said they came out naturally in what he called “that George Jones style” (Samuels 2004: 168).
Stories like Boe’s show us that, even in the case of mediated performance, we cannot assume that we understand musical meaning without exploring the active participation of audience members in producing meanings from their musical experiences. Roland Barthes alludes to this in literature through what he calls “readerly” texts, in which “the reader [is] no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (1974: 4). Charles Keil and Steven Feld have developed an anthropology of culturally grounded musical meaning through their concept of “participation consciousness” (Keil and Feld 1994). Through this social aesthetic of communication, musical form is something that is experienced by its various “coparticipants”—a term that potentially erases the false dichotomy between “performer” and “audience.” Tara Browner’s discussion of the concentric circles of a pow-wow, with the drum at the center, makes an analogous point—especially her discussion of George Martin’s conceptualization of the space, in which the division between “performers” and “audience” is overcome by having all participants located within the outer circle of “a final protective layer of spirits” (2002: 98).
To understand why participating in country music is so powerful for so many Native Americans, we need to shift slightly the way we ask questions about the supposed immutable meanings of country music. Rather than wonder why in the sense of “how is this possible?” we might ask it in the sense of “what does it accomplish?” In that latter sense we can ask, “What kinds of participation and expression does the choice of country music style make possible for Native people? What can one say in a country style that might be different from what one can say, for example, within the musical frameworks of rock, reggae, or hip-hop?”
First, the country music voice is a premier means of expressing thoughts and feelings about attachments to the past—the sense that events in the past refuse to recede into the past, and continue to influence one’s everyday life in important ways. I will explore this in greater detail below, but you can sense it in album titles such as Red Blaze’s Memories and Daydreams, and in Norman Beaver’s voice when he sings in Anishinabe, “I’m thinking back every day as it really happened . . . the truth I’m searching, the past I’m reaching,” in the title song of WigWam’s Adisokaan. Second, country songs often highlight the alienation of urban life, and a preference for older, more rustic, rural ways (Fox 1996). In the song “Quiet Desperation,” Floyd Westerman longs for the “smell of sweetgrass on the plain.” Similarly, Buddy Red Bow and Winston Wuttunee use the aesthetics of country to sing about their boyhood memories.
I want to turn now to the passing relationship that ethnomusicology has had with Native country singers. Though Indian country music has sometimes played an important role in the writings of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, country music may, in fact, play a less prominent role in the musical life of Native American communities today than genres such as rock, hip-hop, and gospel. The Native American Music Awards combine “country” and “folk” into a single category—and it has been some time since a country band or performer has actually won the category.
The notice taken of country artists by scholars of music and culture may also be due to these writers’ focus on rural or reservation communities rather than urban communities, as well as the importance of the West, and in particular the Southwest, in the history of ethnomusicology after World War II. The creation of undergraduate textbooks also played a part. David McAllester’s inclusion of the Fenders’ version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” on the audio cassettes or compact discs that supplement the undergraduate textbook Worlds of Music (Titon 1984)— and the subsequent inclusion of that recording in the audio supplement to John Kaemmer’s textbook Music in Human Life (1993)—accounts in part for the prominence of Native American country music in academic circles.
There is a well-worn joke about every Navajo family consisting of a mother, father, two children, and an anthropologist, and the fascination with the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona for anthropologists and ethnomusicologists extends back into the nineteenth century. Given these long-standing affinities and proximities, one could assume that these scholars were well placed to notice when Navajo and Zuni started playing country music. For many years, however, ethnomusicologists found it difficult to write about Native American popular music at all, let alone country music, except insofar as it registered cultural disintegration.
There is a thread that we can follow, however, to give us some sense of how scholars thinking about music and culture developed an approach to these kinds of musical practices. In 1952 Willard Rhodes wrote of the survival of traditional Native American music as demonstrating that Western, European, or American culture had had very little influence on Native musical styles and practices. He concluded that this in turn demonstrated the truth of Curt Sachs’s cultural-historical assertion that change in musical style occurred more slowly than changes in other cultural domains such as food preparation or transportation—that music is one of the most robust of cultural artifacts, remaining consistent to itself in spite of sometimes massive changes to other aspects of a culture.
A decade later, however, Rhodes (1963) wrote about 49s—“Indian melodies with English words,” he called them. In that article, Rhodes noted that these songs had a history dating back to “Wild West” shows and other theatrical performances that toured the world in the late nineteenth century. This observation challenged his earlier assertions about tenacious stability. It also pointed to a seventy-five-year gap in ethnomusicologists’ engagement with the relationship among music, language, culture, and the politics of ethnic identity.
Rhodes referred to these songs as “hybrid music.” I believe that his may be the earliest use of the concept of “hybridity” in this sense. For Rhodes, these songs were an “index of acculturation,” a way of measuring the extent to which Euro-American society had corrupted, or at least influenced, Native American cultural practices. In the early 1970s another ethnomusicologist, George List (1971), offered another way of thinking about these changes, observing that these new songs were usually arch jibes at the moon-June-swoon proclivities of American popular love-song composers. List thus opened up the possibility—as we discussed earlier— that ironic detachment was an important mode of Native engagement with Bureau-American cultural domination.
David P. McAllester, most widely known for his classic treatments of Navajo ceremonial practices, included a discussion of the Fenders in his article on music for the Southwest volume of the Handbook of Native American Indians (McAllester and Mitchell 1983).6 Recent years have seen increased interest in writing about contemporary musical practices in Native American communities. A special issue of the journal World of Music was dedicated to the topic (Neuenfeldt 2002).
If country music has been underrepresented in the scholarly literature, the same cannot be said of its place in the work of contemporary Native American writers. Sherman Alexie (1994, 1996, 2001), Joy Harjo (1983), and James Welch (1991, 2001) in their poetry and fiction, and, for example, Craig Womack (1997) in his academic writing, have all used the conflicted image of the Indian cowboy and country music in order to portray the perplexities of disenfranchisement and connectedness at work in the formation of contemporary Native American identity. Alexie has perhaps been the most overt in this regard. In his story “The Toughest Indian in the World,” the narrator compares country music legends (and lesser lights) to the world of Christian iconography: “It seemed that every Indian knew all the lyrics to every Hank Williams song ever recorded. Hank was our Jesus, Patsy Cline was our Virgin Mary, and Freddy Fender, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Ronnie Milsap, Tanya Tucker, Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, Donna Fargo, and Charlie Rich were our disciples” (2001: 23). Canadian scholars have written more extensively about Native American country singing than have their peers below the border (Whidden 1984; Witmer 1973, 1974).
Music has been an important part of the assimilationist practices of Bureau-American religious, government, and educational institutions in Indian country since the beginning of the reservation era, if not earlier.7 Music was an important way of monitoring the social practices of Indian communities. Not only the things incarcerated Native people sang about—was rebellion afoot?—but the way they did things in groups was important (Feld 1988). Singing in unison and harmony was not just seen as aesthetically pleasing in comparison to Native ways of vocalizing together but was further associated with the inculcation of democracy, modernity, and Christianity in Native communities. Hymn singing, in either English or Native languages, was taught and encouraged. Many mission and government boarding schools featured bands, and a number of elders on the San Carlos reservation have an undying love of John Philip Sousa’s marches as a result of having performed in these bands as schoolchildren. These new practices not only were coded as “white” and “Christian” in opposition to “red” and “pagan” but also carried heavy implications of middle-class cultural values and the prestige associated with mastery of those practices. Zitkala-Sa studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music and collaborated with William Hanson in composing an opera, Sun Dance. Musical training was an important aspect of both church and school programs. On the San Carlos reservation, the Lutheran missionary’s sister gave piano lessons, and a number of people who spoke with me had taken some.
These new musical practices were certainly not accepted unthinkingly. For one thing, the official policies of churches, educators, and government agencies, as well as the ways in which they were carried out by local representatives, were neither monolithic nor absent any internal inconsistencies. For example, there was a great deal of debate over whether education should be bilingual or in English only (Spack 2002), a debate that had repercussions for the composition of and singing of hymns. The possibility of a successful policy of complete assimilation is further complicated by the presence of a number of highly trained Native American teachers, such as Zitkala-Sa and Luther Standing Bear, who bore witness to the continuing importance of Native lifeways. The notion of the inculcation of “white” cultural values was also complicated by the use of African American educational institutions, such as the Hampton Institute in Virginia, as sites of Native American instruction.
At the same time, local communities had their own means of interpreting the cultural meanings of musical practices. For example, the piano was a highly gendered musical instrument on the San Carlos reservation, considered a feminized means of making music. One man told me that he was teased by his friends for taking up the piano, because it was seen as something “for girls.” The piano was also a highly salient marker of middle-class status in the United States (Parakilas 1999), and very few Apaches could afford the expense of having a piano in the home.
Beyond the raced, cultured, classed, religioned, and gendered contact points of school and church, other forces were also at work, forces that were more masculine, popular, and commercial. The man who remembered being teased for playing the piano also recalled purchasing a guitar through the Sears catalog. On that guitar, he and his brother learned American cowboy songs and Mexican ranchera numbers. Partly for this reason, country music has tended to be a masculine domain, although this certainly has not excluded women from singing it. A number of women usually categorized as “folk,” such as Cherokee Rose, Sharon Burch, Joanne Shenandoah, and of course Buffy Sainte-Marie, have wafted over to country styles occasionally, and certainly in the last instance might even be considered country artists by some listeners.
The introduction of radios onto the San Carlos reservation also brought access to music from distant places into the community. Like many across the United States, people in San Carlos would tune into Grand Ole Opry broadcasts. But according to many people I have spoken with, the genre of music was not all that important. People would tune into stations from Winkelman, Safford, and Globe, “just looking for good music,” as Boe Titla said (Samuels 2004: 136). Here we return to the question of the “purity” of genre in the context of contemporary Native musical practices. Genre mixing among country, pop, rock-and-roll, and Mexican music was prevalent. The Rice school would occasionally hold sock hops—where, according to my consultants, only the girls would dance, the boys standing outside and looking on.
Out of this amalgam of forces and histories emerged the first bands of the 1950s and 1960s—the Fenders, the Navajo Sundowners, the Zuni Midniters, the Isleta Poorboys, Apache Spirit. In those bands, country music lived side by side with Mexican, surf, and rock. On the San Carlos Apache Reservation, as in many other Native American communities, most bands played a mix of styles and genres.
Having looked at the social histories that came together to form country bands in Native communities in the mid-twentieth century, let us now consider some of the musical processes of composition and performance that transform country music into a powerful medium for the voicing of various Native American identities. I wish to consider five main aspects of these musical practices: “cover” versions of country hits by Native performers, the use of country expression and aesthetics to forge connections to a sense of homeland and place, country music as a way of creating connection to social history, the creation of country songs with Native-language texts, and the production of “hybrid” musical performances that blend the soundscape of country music with that of traditional Native musical practices.
The first thing to consider is the role of “cover” versions of country hits by Native bands and singers. It is easy to think that this is the least “Indian” and therefore the most problematic aspect of contemporary country performance in Native American communities. Hearing El Coochise singing “Tulsa Time,” or listening to the Sioux Savages or the Navajo Sundowners singing “Rainy Day Woman,” one might dismiss it as assimilation in its rawest form. This judgment assumes a fairly simple relationship between Waylon Jennings, the members of the Sundowners, and the wider Native American musical community. But the relationship is actually fairly complicated, with a number of different intervening mediations between singer and listener. These layers of mediation include the mediating technologies of production (songwriter, microphone, producer, engineer), as well as the technologies of distribution (radio, recording, audiotape, compact disc), all of which play a part in the relationship between Waylon Jennings’s singing voice and the response it evokes in his various audiences. This is why the relationship between mainstream recording artists and their consuming and listening audiences is so crucial. The Sundowners are one among a number of intermediators who make Waylon Jennings a performer with local Navajo meanings. We return, here, to the social processes of participation through which forms of political and cultural domination are creatively engaged. If many people on the San Carlos reservation were exposed to country music by sitting in front of a radio after school, they were also exposed to it through listening to recordings of Indian country bands. One San Carlos singer I spoke with told me that his mother ordered so many Fenders records from up in Navajo country that for a while he thought she was having an affair with a Navajo (Samuels 2004: 109).
Waylon Jennings probably was not thinking of Native American groups like the Navajo Sundowners when he wrote and sang “Rainy Day Woman.” But the Sundowners played a key role in making the song Native American. Often, when I asked people on the San Carlos reservation who originally sang one country song or another, the response I got was not “Merle Haggard” or “Waylon Jennings” or some other Nashville star. It was “the Fenders,” “the Sundowners,” “the Midniters.” Among the most important of these cover versions are “Rainy Day Woman,” “Sweet Dream Woman,” “Wine,” “T for Texas,” “Driving My Life Away,” “Same Old Tale,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Branded Man,” and “Silver Wings.”
A second process that links country music to Native American ideologies of culture and history is the sense of connection to land and place. As country music is thoroughly emplaced in the rural, the rustic, and the hardscrabble, its global circulation has often involved the way it allows indigenous communities to sing of land, place, and memory (Fox forthcoming). Red Blaze uses country sensibility for the evocation of attachment and memory—the line “long-gone memories keep on buggin’ me,” in their song “Chains of Change,” simultaneously evokes a country and Native stance on the place of memory and the past in contemporary life. The Zuni Midniters’ use of an easy triplet feel country-rock setting to sing their political protest “You took my land / You made it your country” is in that sense a logical choice.8 Country music links the personal to the political through sung narratives of loss (Fox 1992, 1996). Boe Titla uses this resonance to the fullest in his original compositions about places and histories of the San Carlos Apaches. Similarly, Buddy Red Bow, J. Hubert Francis, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and Edmund Bull use the sensibilities of country music to sing of the feeling of, and for, place.
Another closely related feature linking country sensibility and Native American ideology is the turn toward the past as a way of deeply experiencing one’s self-knowledge. A sense of historical connectedness pervades the lyrical texts of Native country songs. Boe Titla’s songs about the places that are important to the San Carlos Apaches evoke social histories because the importance of those places is strongly attached to the stories of the things that happened in those places (Basso 1996). These songs evoke an emotional attachment to place by linking feelings for historical events to feelings for musical form. Boe credits the mood evoked by his songs to the “George Jones style” of his songwriting. By mentioning a place, like Chiricahua Mountain or Point of Pines, in a song, Boe evokes memories in his listeners. And he is highly conscious of the idea that music can make you remember people and events. Boe does not account for these memories simply by pointing to his lyrics. Rather, it is the entire sung vocalization and instrumental arrangement that he talks about: “Maybe the sound that I put in there, the mood, the emotion of the song, or the speed of the song, or the words that touch them, that makes them see somebody, or back to those days, or something like that” (Samuels 2004: 169). In this quote, “words” are actually the last thing that Boe mentions. He places questions of timbre, emotion, and tempo first—all of which are features of country music’s generic conventions for arousing affective responses.
Famous historical events and Native leaders—Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Geronimo, Navajo Code Talkers—are also celebrated and remembered through country songs. A number of Canadian performers have made songs that commemorate the importance of the 1885 Northwest Rebellion, an armed confrontation led by the Cree chiefs Big Bear and Pound-maker, and the French Canadian champion of the Métis, Louis Riel.
A fourth process that transforms country music into a Native expression is found in the composition of country songs with Native language texts. These performers combine the feeling of country music, the importance of place and of historical memory, in texts that evoke indigenous identity by claiming particular linguistic territory as a meeting place of Native and non-Native identities and affective responses. WigWam sings of history, heritage, and land in their native Anishinabe language. Leonard Adam, born in Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan, sings country songs in his native Dene about memories of elders and being prepared to bear knowledge of culture and history into the future. Apache Spirit has composed and sung songs in Western Apache, such as “Nii Shi Chia Zhoo”9 (You are beautiful to me) on The Lawman, and the liner notes of their second album, Keep Movin’ On, are written in Apache.
Finally, there are hybrid processes at work in songs that incorporate Native styles of vocalization and Native instruments into the production of their country-and-western songs. On the song “Drum,” Red Blaze mixes country with northern grass dance singing to proclaim, “Our way of life ain’t gone forever.” Apache Spirit often mixes the calls and bells of the Gahn into their songs.10 Many country performers blend indigenous flutes and drums into their arrangements. And many more use Native vocable formulas, or incorporate Native songs into their vocal arrangements. The Red Bull singers appear as special backup vocalists on Edmund Bull’s Indian Boy. Eagle Feather and Buddy Red Bow also have songs that bring traditional singers, usually songs associated with the northern pow-wow, into the mix as a means of staking claims of Native identity.
To return to our original reformulation of the central question about country singing: what does the country voice accomplish for its Native American singers? More than anything, country is the sound of memory, of the desire for days and places that are always both within and out of reach. If the rock voice is about rebellion, the reggae voice about protest, and the hip-hop voice about preaching truth, then the country voice is about memory. Country music is an important way for Native Americans to link social memory and sociopolitical position. This is one reason that political activists such as Buddy Red Bow and Floyd Westerman have found in country singing a participatory genre that allows them to voice their concerns. Country engenders a personal and social affective response in its listeners that allows people to experience cultural history through the tone, mood, meter, rhyme scheme, and instrumentation of the songs, be they cover versions of “Swinging Doors,” songs in Cree with twin fiddles and steel guitars (George Strait’s version of “Pure Country”), or songs about the land with a northern drum singing Fancy Dance songs in the background.
In Sherman Alexie’s story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” (2003), the protagonist, Jackson Jackson, a homeless Spokane Indian, is trying to scrounge up enough money to buy his grandmother’s pow-wow regalia from a Seattle pawnshop. Despondent, he wanders down to the wharf, where he sees three homeless Aleuts sitting on the same bench where he had seen them the day before. After sitting in silence for a long while, Jackson asks the Aleuts a question:
I thought about my grandmother. I’d never seen her dance in her regalia. And, more than anything, I wished I’d seen her dance at a powwow.
“Do you guys know any songs?” I asked the Aleuts.
“I know all of Hank Williams,” the elder Aleut said.
“How about Indian songs?”
“Hank Williams is Indian.”
“How about sacred songs?”
“Hank Williams is sacred.”
“I’m talking about ceremonial songs. You know, religious ones. The songs you sing back home when you’re wishing and hoping.”
“What are you wishing and hoping for?”
“I’m wishing my grandmother was still alive.”
“Every song I know is about that.”
“Well, sing me as many as you can.”
The Aleuts sang their strange and beautiful songs. I listened. They sang about my grandmother and about their grandmothers. They were lonesome for the cold and the snow. I was lonesome for everything. (176)
In this passage, Alexie links country music, memory, and cultural history to an affective sense of exploitation and desire. In contrast to the original notion that ethnic Indian identity and hardscrabble white identity were somehow at odds with each other, here we experience a point at which ethnicity and class overlap. Obviously, the histories of working-class whites and Native Americans are not identical, but their trajectories overlap in the feeling of expropriation and alienation that is the result of the kinds of historical relationships with bourgeois “civilizing” practices that prefer pianos to guitars (Samuels 2004: 101). Jackson Jackson cannot find redemption because he cannot redeem his grandmother’s pawned regalia, even though it is in the pawnshop because it was stolen. Jackson is homeless, and although his homelessness is due to a reason that he keeps secret because “Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks,” his homelessness places him in an economic or class as well as an ethnic and cultural position. His economic position threatens to make it impossible to reclaim the loss of his grandmother’s regalia. Hank Williams sings of loss, and it is the kind of affective attachment to the lost object that Native Americans can identify with.
1. See the suggestions for further listening at the end of this article.
2. In 1991 she had changed her name from Eileen to Shania—reputedly the Ojibwa word for “I’m on my way.” As it turned out, her adoptive father was Native, but she had no Indian “blood” to lay claim to. The arguments stirred by Shania’s statements revisited old questions of “nature” and “nurture,” and whether “blood” or “upbringing” is what makes you who you are (see Strong and Van Winkle 1996).
3. It is instructive to compare this 1975 statement by Cash with Tom Dear-more’s 1969 profile of Cash for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, in which the author wrote, “Cash, who has the face and stature of his Cherokee forebears . . .” (Streissguth 2002: 100).
4. The classic statement of this position about art can be found in Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in which artistic greatness is found not in the complete resolution (identity) of elements, but in the incomplete struggle for resolution and its inevitable failure.
5. Of course such a collection exists: Sony, 40665.
6. McAllester also included an extended discussion of the rock band XIT, led by Navajo tribal member Tom Bee, but as this chapter is concerned with country music, I will not discuss that. Tom Bee is currently the president of Sound of America Records, one of the more successful Native music production companies in the United States.
7. John Gregory Bourke (1891) wrote of an organ grinder who traveled the Southwest unharmed because the Indians found him so entertaining.
8. It is difficult, of course, to make a blanket statement about the uses of country sensibility. Country music itself has a history of attachments and separations with other musical genres, and the genre mixing found in Native communities creates more complications. The Zuni Midniters’ songs crossed these boundaries at a time when both the style and the subject matter of many country and rock songs covered overlapping domains.
9. As with many Apache speakers, the orthography for writing Apache has not been standardized. A more standard linguist’s orthographic rendering of the song title would be “nii shich’i zhoo.”
10. Gaan are mountain spirits.
Alexie, Sherman. 1994. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Perennial.
——. 1996. Reservation Blues. New York: Warner Books.
——. 2001. The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Grove Press.
——. 2003. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” New Yorker, April 21–28, 2003.
Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.
Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Bernard, Shane. 1996. Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Bourke, John G. 1891. On the Border with Crook. Reprint, Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Browner, Tara. 2002. Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-wow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ching, Barbara. 2003. Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Duranti, Alessandro, and Donald Brenneis. 1986. “The Audience as Co-author.” Text 6, no. 3.
Feld, Steven. 1988. “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style (Uptown Title); or, (Downtown Title) ‘Lift-Up-Over Sounding’: Getting into the Kaluli Groove.” Reprinted in Music Grooves, by Charles Keil and Steven Feld, 109–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Feld, Steven, Aaron Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels. 2004. “Vocal Anthropology: From the Language of Music to the Music of Voice.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 321–46. New York: Blackwell.
Fox, Aaron. 1992. “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music.” Popular Music 11, no. 1: 53–72.
——. 1996. “‘Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away?’: Talk, Trash, and Technology in a Texas ‘Redneck’ Bar.” In Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, edited by Barbara Ching, 105–30. New York: Routledge.
——. Forthcoming. Introduction to Songs Out of Place, edited by Aaron Fox and Christine Yano. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harjo, Joy. 1983. She Had Some Horses. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
Ivey, Bill. 1998. Liner notes to From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music. Warner Brothers/Reprise, 947428-2.
Jensen, Joli. 1998. The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Kaemmer, John. 1993. Music in Human Life. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Keil, Charles, and Steven Feld. 1994. Music Grooves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
List, George. 1971. “Song in Hopi Culture, Past and Present.” Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 3: 30–35.
Malone, Bill C. 1985. Country Music USA. Austin: University of Texas Press.
McAllester, David P., and Douglas F. Mitchell. 1983. “Navajo Music.” In Handbook of North American Indians, edited by Alfonso Ortiz, ed., 10:605–23. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Neuenfeldt, Karl. 2002. “Indigenous Popular Music in North America: Continuations and Innovations.” World of Music 44, no. 1.
Parakilas, James, ed. 1999. Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rhodes, Willard. 1952. “Acculturation in North American Indian Music.” In International Congress of Americanists: Proceedings of the 19th Congress, edited by Sol Tax, 127–32. New York: Cooper Square.
——. 1963. “North American Indian Music in Transition: A Study of Songs with English Words as an Index of Acculturation.” Journal of the International folk Music Council 15: 9–14.
Samuels, David W. 2004. Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Spack, Ruth. 2002. America’s Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860–1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Stokes, Martin. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg.
Streissguth, Michael, ed. 2002. Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Reader. New York: Da Capo Press.
Strong, Pauline Turner, and Barrik Van Winkle. 1996. “‘Indian Blood’: Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity.” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 4: 547–76.
Taylor, Timothy D. 2007. “You Can Take ‘Country’ Out of the Country, but It Will Never Be ‘World.’” In Songs Out of Place, edited by Aaron Fox and Christine Yano. Durham: Duke University Press.
Titon, Jeff. 1984. Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World’s Peoples. New York: Schirmer Books.
Welch, James. 1991. The Indian Lawyer. New York: Penguin Books.
——. 2001. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Anchor.
Whidden, Lynn. 1984. “‘How Can You Dance to Beethoven?’: Native People and Country Music.” Canadian University Music Review 5: 87–103.
Witmer, Robert. 1973. “Recent Changes in the Musical Culture of the Blood Indians of Alberta, Canada.” Yearbook for Inter-American Research 9: 64–94.
——. 1974. “‘White’ Music among the Blood Indians of Alberta.” Canadian Journal of Traditional Music.
Womack, Craig. 1997. As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Adam, Leonard. Spirit Flies. Turtle Island Music.
Apache Spirit. Indian Cowboy. Canyon Records.
——. The Lawman. AltaVista.
Bull, Edmund. Indian Boy. Turtle Island Music.
The Country Siders. The Country Siders. AltaVista.
Eagle Feather. No Boundaries. Sunshine Records.
The Fenders. Introducing the Fenders. Hammerhouse Productions.
——. On Steel. Hammerhouse Productions.
Fenders II. Out in New Mexico. AltaVista.
Francis, J. Hubert, and Eagle Feather. Reverence. Sunshine Records.
Gladstone, Jack. Noble Heart. Hawkstone.
Monias, Ernest. A Tribute to Hank Williams. Sunshine Records.
One Ninety One. Just for Her. AltaVista.
Red Blaze. Memories and Daydreams. Turtle Island Music.
Red Bow, Buddy. Black Hills Dreamer. Tatanka Records, 4102.
Sioux Savages. Sioux Savages. Dine Records.
Stillwater Band. Suspicion. AltaVista.
The Thunders. Volume 1. AltaVista.
Watchman, Henry. Rocking Rebels/Navajo Sundowners/Oldies. AltaVista.
Westerman, Floyd Red Crow. Custer Died for Your Sins.
——. The Land Is Your Mother.
WigWam. Adisokaan. Sunshine Records.
Wuttunee, Winston. The Best of Winston Wuttunee. Turtle Island Music, TIM 30040.
Zuni Midniters. My Land. Hammerhouse Productions.