IT’S MY WAY! was a creative triumph, but the record wasn ’t a huge commercial success—it sold well but didn’t chart, and it didn’t make Sainte-Marie a household name. However, it did catapult her to a level of success that made her enough money to ensure a lifetime of relative freedom and cemented her position as one of the most important folk songwriters of the 1960s, even if she wasn’t one of the most famous. With “Universal Soldier,” “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Cod’ine,” and the title track, It’s My Way! was a bona fide triumph.

And Sainte-Marie kind of hated it.

“I was just heartbroken with my first album,” she says, putting on a slightly vengeful, funny voice. “But it sold and it’s still selling, so maybe I shouldn’t have an opinion, I guess!” Sainte-Marie had no say in the process of selecting which takes Vanguard used, but she believes that if she’d been consulted, it would have been a better record, one that was in tune, beautiful as well as tragic. “They were going for ‘if it bleeds, it leads,’ and they wanted it to sound like it was bleeding,” she says. “I can’t get anybody to agree with me on this point, and most people will say, ‘No, no, no.’”

There’s a cruel irony to the fact that the album is so decisively titled, and yet Sainte-Marie felt so excluded from the decision-making process. This background doesn’t diminish the importance of It’s My Way!—if anything, it reaffirms the challenges facing many new artists, particularly a racialized young woman who wanted to make a brilliant, bold, utterly confident debut. “The only thing that matters to the business side of show business is money,” Sainte-Marie says. “If it sells, it doesn’t matter—it can be a turd in the basket. What I always come back to is: this old world is very young, but some things don’t change. Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple for some very good reasons.”

Sainte-Marie’s cynicism about the business part of show business is born out of her own first-hand experiences. It also stems from talking to other artists and witnessing some spectacular disasters. “There’s no telling how many records they [the music industry] have destroyed, but everybody I know, every artist who I’ve ever talked to, has had a similar dilemma in trying to get their baby born intact,” Sainte-Marie says. “Maynard Solomon [Vanguard’s co-founder] was saying that he was producing me, but actually, he was editing me.”

Sainte-Marie wasn’t thrilled with the final outcome of It’s My Way! or the next few records that followed, primarily because of her vocal performance. “I wish that I had been able to choose the takes because Vanguard had a certain perception of me, I think, and really wanted to rub it in,” she says. “In my first couple of records, whoever was choosing the takes wanted me to sound like I was kind of old and dying. I think they imagined that maybe I was a junkie or they probably thought that I was going to be a young casualty.”

It’s possible that Vanguard thought it was best to steer hard into the harsh tragedy of “Cod’ine” without understanding the real hell Sainte-Marie experienced in order to write it. “Cod’ine” was written in despair but also in anger. It wasn’t the explosive, fiery kind that burns up and burns out. Nor was it the kind of anger that scorches the earth, necessary for regrowth and renewal. “Cod’ine” conveyed something deeper. It was world-weary and from the bone, leaden with exhaustion and frustration and the resentment that comes from decades of survival and trauma, oppression, and violation. As Sainte-Marie sang it, it’s not surprising that some of the people at the record label may have thought they were dealing with a young person active in her addiction. She was twenty-three when she first recorded the song, but she sounds ninety in some parts. Even though there’s a performative element to the original 1964 recording, the wildness of her vulnerability and her broken howls are chilling.

The song comes from Sainte-Marie’s brief addiction to opioids. “I was assaulted in the sixties—well, I think of it as assault—by a doctor,” Sainte-Marie says. “It was the only time I had been involved with opiates. I was given them against my will by a doctor who [later] went to jail for turning young women out, you know, into prostitutes. He went to jail. Not because of me, but I heard [about it] later.”

The opiates were administered to supposedly help manage an ongoing cough she experienced following a bronchial infection. In Florida, a clinic doctor prescribed her shots and pills that Sainte-Marie thought were vitamin B12 and antibiotics. She received the shots for a few weeks, and then she set out to drive to Atlanta with some friends. Sainte-Marie wasn’t feeling well and figured she was still sick, so she stopped at a drugstore to get a refill. The pharmacist looked at the prescription and told her that he didn’t think she was sick—she was strung out and going through withdrawal. She was stunned, and in the days that followed, she continued to struggle through withdrawal. It was hell, she remembers, and a shocking violation of consent: according to Sainte-Marie, the doctor prescribed the opiates without telling her what they were. She alleges that he did this to her on purpose and for personal gain, hoping to get her and other young women addicted so he could exploit them.

There’s a pained authenticity in the earthquake of her voice as she sings “Cod’ine,” the aftershocks of her vibrato almost swallowing words whole as she bellows, “An’ it’s real, one more time.” Yet “Cod’ine” wasn’t meant, as some critics interpreted it, as a contribution to the anti-hippie, anti-drug, reefer-madness panic-song canon. She wrote it as a means of processing her experience and offering a personal warning; there was nothing glamorous or rock ’n’ roll or cool about addiction. Some of her peers laughed at the notion of being addicted to something as “tame” as codeine, but an opiate is an opiate, and there are deadly consequences to its addictiveness as well as its relative availability.

The producers at Vanguard who’d mistaken her for a drug addict misunderstood her in other ways too. Not only had they steered her towards vocal performances that were not up to her own live performance standards, they failed to trust their young artist’s instincts about where she should be marketed. While her peer group in New York liked it, she is still disappointed that there was no push and no strategy to get it into the hands of not only music industry types, students, and art-y counterculture activists in major cities like L.A. and London, but also to the places that could most benefit from it, such as her two “homes.”

“It didn’t get to the boonies, and it didn’t get to Indian country,” Sainte-Marie says, referring to any reservation or land occupied and self-governed by Indigenous people. Now, the term is more of an Indigenous colloquialism to refer to any area primarily inhabited by Indigenous people. Sainte-Marie wanted a wider audience for It’s My Way! because she believed in the songs and that the information needed to be out in the world.

Despite Sainte-Marie’s misgivings, It’s My Way! experienced continued success. She frequently played on the road, got rave reviews for her performances, and grew her audience one show at a time—which is still her approach to this day.

When Sainte-Marie is onstage, she’s transfixing. When she opens her mouth to sing and the words spill over you, they tuck inside every hollow, even the ones you didn’t know you had. The sensation is a visceral one. It can be unsettling and unnerving to be temporarily subsumed. But it can also be the greatest experience of your life. John Kay still remembers the first time he saw Sainte-Marie play live. It was in the summer of 1964, and he was visiting Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood. Kay himself wasn’t in a band yet—he was a year away from joining the Canadian rock band the Sparrows, and three years away from forming Steppenwolf.

“That was the first time that I heard Buffy live,” Kay says. “I got her first album, It’s My Way!, and I was just totally bowled over. In fact, the reason why I went and got the album is because Buffy’s stage persona and the intensity of her performance and the passion with which she sang the songs—particularly ‘It’s My Way’ and ‘Now That the Buffalo’s Gone’ and ‘Cod’ine’—just knocked me out. At this juncture, we had heard Joan Baez, we had Judy Collins, but these were all females that were very restrained, shall we say, in their vocal delivery. Buffy was like this whirlwind of intensity—she gave you goose bumps.”

As her fame grew and she attracted new audiences, she took full advantage of the airplane tickets that could bring her to Indigenous areas and communities, and she often built in time to visit the Piapots and meet other young Indigenous activists wherever she’d play. She consciously capitalized on the success of It’s My Way! to bring attention to Indigenous people and talk about broken treaties, exploitation, unfair treatment, and genocide. And she knew only too well that while she was using her privilege and success to talk about Indigenous rights, other musicians—mostly men—were recording her songs and turning them into hits.

Sainte-Marie had been singing “Universal Soldier” for a few years, and it featured prominently on the tracklist for It’s My Way! The Highwaymen had recorded it too, but the song didn’t become a hit until 1965—though not for Sainte-Marie. Folk singer Donovan Philips Leitch, who recorded as Donovan, started performing in 1964. Hyped sometimes as the British Bob Dylan, Donovan heard Sainte-Marie sing “Universal Soldier” live in London, England, and decided to cover it. He released his version in 1965, and it charted both in the U.K. (at number five) and in the U.S. (number fifty-three on Billboard). Suddenly, everyone was talking about “Universal Soldier” as if Donovan had written it. When he covered “Cod’ine” shortly thereafter, Sainte-Marie’s authorship was erased yet again. To this day, there are numerous websites that credit him as the songwriter and it’s blatant sexism that, fifty years later, this is still a common misconception.

“I still have people insist that Donovan wrote ‘Universal Soldier’ and ‘Cod’ine,’” Sainte-Marie says. “I’ve had people actually confront me about it.” Donovan’s success could be attributed to the inherent “authority” that society gives to men’s words, the weight they carry, unlike women who apparently speak in dandelion fluff and helium balloons, not bricks of gold. Sainte-Marie’s songwriting, her infiltration of the “boys’ club” mentality of show business and the folk music scene, precedes the women’s liberation movement by a number of years. While this isn’t an issue unique to Sainte-Marie and Donovan, it’s easy to identify two major ways in which he has been lauded by the music industry while Sainte-Marie’s contributions have been ignored. In 2012, Donovan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 2014, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame—neither of which have recognized Sainte-Marie.

It’s even more galling considering how hard Sainte-Marie had to work to get the rights back to “Universal Soldier.” One night at the Gaslight, Sainte-Marie signed away her publishing rights to the song for one dollar. In John Einarson’s book, Four Strong Winds: Ian and Sylvia,¹¹ Sainte-Marie recalls that it was the night the Highwaymen heard her perform “Universal Soldier.” She got off stage and went to join them, and they told her they planned to record her song. They asked her who the publisher was, and she responded “What’s that?” Pianist and musical supervisor Elmer Jared Gordon was sitting with them and offered to “help,” drawing up a contract on the spot. She signed away the rights to “Universal Soldier,” happy that somebody was going to help spread its message to an audience she never felt she would reach. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” Sainte-Marie sighs. “Basically I had already made up my mind that I was okay as a loner. I was never going to be part of a group. I was never going to have a big career in show business.” (It took her ten years and $25,000 to buy the song’s rights back.)

That outsider feeling remained even when It’s My Way! hit in the U.K. Sainte-Marie went to England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales on a tour with Julie Felix, Reverend Gary Davis, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and a then-unknown Paul Simon. They were in England, and she was the headliner at the famous Royal Albert Hall—Simon was just starting out—and all she really remembers is that he was quite reserved. She was surprised when her name came up in his 2016 biography, Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon.¹² According to the biography, Simon was determined to flip the order of the show so that he was the headliner, with Sainte-Marie opening for him—even though she was the established star and Simon was just starting out. “The book says that Paul was just determined that he was going to headline the show, and the concert producer was saying that was absolutely ridiculous,” she recalls. “[Paul] wasn’t well known yet, he wasn’t a star, he had no respect, and he was just trying to claw his way up like a businessman. I only found out about it a few months ago in that book. I didn’t even know that was going on at the time!” She laughs. “That’s how unimportant it was to me.”

While some artists were jealous of Sainte-Marie’s burgeoning fame and prominence, others could see a whole new world of possibility with Sainte-Marie in the spotlight. Denise Kaufman was a fan of Sainte-Marie’s before they became close friends more than forty years ago. In the mid-sixties, Kaufman co-founded Ace of Cups, widely considered to be San Francisco’s first all-woman rock band. Sainte-Marie reaffirmed what kind of artist Kaufman wanted to be.

“There was a dearth of women who touched my heart, but Buffy did,” Kaufman says. “A lot of people that were into music at the time were really into Joan Baez. And I appreciated Joan’s voice and I appreciated her activism, but I wanted to believe that the person singing was the person who wrote the song. It sort of always bothered me. When I first heard Buffy, it was like, you know, she was her songs. She wrote them, which was much more of an inspiration to me. She’s so real, and it cut me to the core when I first heard her. Just that a woman could be that strong and also that tender. She transmitted so much in her voice. Her beauty and her look opened up so much because there weren’t people around singing who looked like her and who sang about what she sang about. She was my hero.”