IN 1971, SAINTE-MARIE lay in a hospital bed feeling like she was going to die, recovering from a recurring digestive problem that had caused convulsive vomiting. “I was in the hospital and really not doing very good,” Sainte-Marie remembers. “When I woke up, this guy was standing next to my bed, and he showed me a picture.” It was Vanguard’s art director, Jules Halfant, who was a well-known painter and printmaker in his own right. “He shows me the cover that they were proposing to use for The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Vol. 2 [album], and I just hated it. Greasy-looking orange face, green hair—not hip, just gimmicky, bad art. And he said, ‘Well, Maynard [Solomon] says this is the one that we’re going to use if you don’t re-sign with us.’”

The previous year had seen the release of the first Sainte-Marie compilation, The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie, and it gave her the only gap in what was otherwise a demanding annual record-release schedule that had begun in 1964 with It’s My Way! and didn’t end until 1976 with Sweet America. These compilations were in addition to her contracted output of new material. The double album compilation in 1970 was rumored to have been a response to the financial loss of 1969’s Illuminations. Sainte-Marie’s relationship with Vanguard was already fraught, and it didn’t improve much after the release of the Nitzsche-produced She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina, which also failed to find an audience or much radio play. But, after “Soldier Blue” became a hit in the U.K., Sainte-Marie’s 1968 song, “I’m Gonna Be a Country Girl Again,” found a brief second life and also charted overseas. To capitalize on the success of these two songs, Vanguard wanted to release a second best-of double album, 1971’s The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Vol. 2, featuring the album cover that Sainte-Marie despises to this day and calls “the blackmail album.”

The threat to use a photo she hated if she didn’t do what they wanted made her feel like she’d come full circle. After all, when Vanguard first signed Sainte-Marie and learned that she didn’t have a lawyer, they offered to “let her” use theirs. “God, was I green. I signed a seven-year deal.” This time was different. She did not want to re-sign with them, having fulfilled her contract with her seventh album, She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina. But she felt like her hands were tied, and so she gave in. They used the photo anyway.

The album cover looks like a literal red-washing of Sainte-Marie’s face, her hair is windswept to one side, and her smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. It’s the expression of someone who looks reluctant, someone who’s being forced. And it wasn’t the first time Sainte-Marie’s image had been altered in this racist way. “For the U.K. release of It’s My Way!, the London guys tinted my face red for that—to be sure everybody got the point that it was a ‘real red Indian,’” Sainte-Marie recalls. But this new cover was glaringly out of place with most of her North American album art up to that point, which was more artistic, inventive, and creative. It looks like the punishment Sainte-Marie says it was. “They put that one [Vol. 2] out, and I just didn’t want to work with them anymore,” she says. “I didn’t want to re-sign with them, and they knew it. I still hate that cover.”

In addition to Sainte-Marie’s illness (the result of a small deformity in her digestive tract, which she still manages with medicine to this day) and the “blackmail album,” 1971 also marked the end of her marriage to Dewain Bugbee. She was on the road all the time, and at first he joined her, but he hated being away from Hawai‘i and their farm. After a number of years of long-distance phone calls and not-too-frequent in-person visits, they decided to divorce.

But 1971 also brought her into teenage crush Elvis Presley’s orbit when he heard her song, “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” and fell in love with it himself. The song had appeared on Sainte-Marie’s 1965 album Many a Mile. “I didn’t even tell people I wrote it for the longest time,” Sainte-Marie says. “I wasn’t ashamed of it, but I didn’t tell anybody I wrote it because it’s a pop song.” That’s how intense the anti-pop sentiment of folk and protest musicians was in 1965. Had she wanted to capitalize on its popularity, Sainte-Marie could have had another career as an in-demand pop balladeer. It seemed like everyone making pop and rock music in the sixties and seventies recorded their own version of Sainte-Marie’s unusual love song.

“Until It’s Time for You to Go” is Sainte-Marie’s most covered song and her most conventional pop standard as well, but it’s still a little different and subverts many of the trappings of standard love songs. Its melody is not quite as sentimental, its bridge progression is wonderfully unconventional, and its themes are decidedly progressive; the narrator’s expectations are realistic and mature but still passionate. It’s the exact opposite of “undying devotion” songs in which love is cement-glue and side-by-side coffins, a suffocating blood oath that can’t be broken. Those kinds of songs have a certain romantic appeal, but that’s not what’s happening in this song. This is about a love that is not forever and will not last, and no one is blind to its brevity or lying to themselves or to each other.

Lesley Gore’s 1963 performance of “You Don’t Own Me” was thought of as an early feminist pop anthem, and it was, but the song was written by two men. Sainte-Marie released “Until It’s Time for You to Go” two years before Aretha Franklin’s gender-flipping, jaw-dropping performance of “Respect” hit the airwaves, and though Sainte-Marie’s song wasn’t heralded as a feminist anthem, there’s something radically empowering about it. It’s sung from the perspective of a woman who has total agency, who is actively resisting gendered stereotypes and the coding of forever-love as a girlish dream. She has a shared vision for what this partnership will—or could—look like. “Don’t ask why, don’t ask how/Don’t ask forever of me/Love me now,” she demands.

The song wasn’t a hit for the songwriter herself, but it was for Bobby Darin, the Four Pennies, Neil Diamond, Andy Williams, and, most significantly, Elvis Presley. Cher, Barbra Streisand, Roberta Flack, Françoise Hardy, Bette Davis, and many others also put their spin on it, while Nancy Sinatra and Glen Campbell covered it separately and then turned it into a duet, extracting the song’s gentle melancholy. Its wildest treatment is the soulful and sexy R&B kiss-off offered up by the New Birth featuring Susaye Greene’s spellbinding lead vocals.

At first Sainte-Marie wasn’t thrilled about the idea of anyone else covering it, particularly because it was a love song and pretty personal to her, though she declines to specify for whom she wrote it. “It kind of bothered me a little bit because it’s a different kind of song,” Sainte-Marie remembers. “The first person who covered it was Bobby Darin. His musical director either felt that I had made an unintentional mistake or he totally missed the very cool melody that came to work against what’s going on in the chords. He turned it into a very vanilla thing. In my original, changing the chords under that melody, it gives the song a certain delicious, suspended, totally unique feel. Chet Atkins was the first person to suggest that maybe I had written a standard, something that was just plain different from anything anybody else had done. Chet couldn’t get over the suspensions and the bridge progression. They [Darin and his musical director] overlooked it; they turned it into an ordinary thing, like a Protestant hymn. To me, that was totally blowing the sexy. He turned it into bus tickets instead of sexual tension.”

And as more people covered the song, some would cover it her way, while others built upon Darin’s version or the “Vegas version” as she sometimes calls it. “I had to go through this thing where I had to let the song go and have a life. I came to understand that, actually, it’s a huge compliment no matter how much some other artist might reinterpret or just plain get it wrong,” she laughs. “Gradually I’ve really come to appreciate other artists taking it into their lives because I know what’s involved with that. You fall in love with a song. You take the time to learn it and to learn how to play it and you teach it to other people and other people teach it to the band. It just takes on a life of its own. That artist gives it to his or her own audience, and that’s really something. Now I look at it with great gratitude and appreciation because some of my songs that have been done differently from the way I would do them are just lovely. It’s like seeing your child grow up.”

Sainte-Marie also took ownership of “Until It’s Time for You to Go” publicly, though, of course, people continued to attribute the song to others. “I actually had somebody claim that they wrote it,” she says. “It was just some bozo trying to exploit something. It took two minutes to straighten it out because he was lying and I had the proof. We didn’t spend any time on that.” There was even a rumor that Rod McKuen, the American poet and singer-songwriter, had written the song. It seemed like people wanted to attribute “Until It’s Time for You to Go” to anyone but Sainte-Marie. It’s hard to say exactly why, but it’s easy to deduce that racism, sexism, and classism were all factors. What was a young, Indigenous protest singer doing penning a pop standard and breaking through, at least partly, into the mainstream?

The song was shot into another stratosphere of recognition thanks to Elvis Presley. By 1971, Presley had already mounted one comeback and a lengthy Las Vegas residency and was moving into a new phase of his career. Sainte-Marie was in Nashville recording her 1972 album Moonshot with musician-producer Norbert Putnam. Putnam was part of the famous Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, had been in Presley’s band, and had also worked with all of the top session players at the time, such as his music partner David Briggs and the Memphis Horns, many of whom had also played with Presley. Sainte-Marie was recording one of Presley’s songs, a B-side from one of his earliest albums called “My Baby Left Me,” by Arthur Crudup.

“I memorized all of Elvis Presley’s first few albums, and I loved that song,” she says. “We finished the take and the phone rang and it was one of Elvis’s associates, a guy that I had met through Chet [Atkins] many times. When you’re in Nashville, and you go out to dinner with Chet, you’re going to meet a lot of people,” Sainte-Marie remembers. “I got to meet a lot of the business people that ordinarily would not have come into my life. And so this associate of Elvis’s called and said, [she puts on a deep southern drawl] ‘Buffy? Elvis just recorded your song, “Until It’s Time for You to Go.”’ By this time, I was pretty much over Elvis; he was singing mostly formula stuff,” Sainte-Marie says. Still, when Presley’s associate called, Sainte-Marie could barely contain her glee. “It was Elvis Presley, come on!” Sainte-Marie laughs at the memory. “Don’t think of Tom Parker Elvis; think of Elvis before that horror got hold of him. When I was thirteen, Elvis was fresh. He was young. He was healthy and beautiful, and he was sexy and a natural musician. He was everything. He was just everything.”

There’s almost no expression of love that’s more pure or more intense than first love; that early devotion still stirs up a bit of a giddy, amazed feeling for Sainte-Marie. “It was just a total surprise,” she admits. “Elvis had already gone into kind of a different style. He no longer had that young rebel thing going for him. And the army and church—you know, he was a pretty conservative guy. But when he recorded ‘Until It’s Time for You to Go,’ it was just amazing. It was as if Santa Claus had said yes to coming to your birthday party.” But then Presley’s associate followed up with a demand. “The guy said, ‘We’re going to have to have some of that publishing money, honey,’ and I said no.”

Presley might have been on the decline, but he was still one of the biggest artists in the world. Presley’s managers could effectively argue that his stardom would elevate the song and he deserved a cut for the increased sales, but Sainte-Marie wasn’t interested. “He hadn’t written it, period, and I felt that it was [an] unfair [demand],” she says. “I had given away the publishing to ‘Universal Soldier’ for a dollar about ten years earlier because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I certainly was not going to do that again. I had already made up my mind that I was never going to have a big career in show business. It was just me. It’s not right for the lawyers to come along and ask for a cut of a song that they had nothing to do with. Elvis hadn’t written it. If he had, I would have split the publishing [profits], but he hadn’t. So it was a very easy decision. I said, ‘No, I can’t do that, too bad.’ So I let it go and figured, well, he’s not going to record it.”

He not only recorded it—he recorded it at least nine times, including live versions, and put it in movies. It quickly became one of his signature songs. Presley first released his cover in 1972, but later that year he and Priscilla Presley would file for divorce (finalized in 1973). It had been, ostensibly, a love song from him to his wife, and it did become their anthem, but it was also more complicated than that. Presley’s rendition of Sainte-Marie’s song is performative to a certain extent—he’d had an affair and so had Priscilla, and he needed some image rehab. There was incentive to perform his heartbreak publicly so that women would still worship him. But it’s also a convincingly rueful treatment—he really does sound regretful, a little lost, and like he let love down.

Consider how differently the song presents in Presley’s version with the slight lyrical changes and gender flip compared with Sainte-Marie’s version. When Sainte-Marie sings “I’m not a queen/I’m a woman/take my hand,” it can be interpreted as a declaration of autonomy and equality. So often when a woman is put on a pedestal by a man, there’s an element of misogyny at work: her personhood is erased, she’s held to an impossible set of standards or expectations, and he doesn’t need to deal with her in any real, messy, day-to-day ways. But a woman telling a man that he’s not a “dream” or an “angel” is different than a man telling a woman the same thing. The difference is in the power dynamics of language, the coding of vulnerability and softness, clichés of femininity and masculinity, and gendered romantic ideals. In Sainte-Marie’s version, “take my hand” sounds like an invitation; in Presley’s, it sounds like a demand.

And did Presley and his team continue to make demands of the songwriter? “Every time Elvis was about to record it again, they would call me: ‘Buffy, we’re gonna have to have some of that publishing [money].’ My lawyer would say, ‘They called again,’ and I would say, ‘No,’” Sainte-Marie remembers. “It was just a business ploy. Elvis still hadn’t written the song, and there was a principle involved, which I felt would also benefit other songwriters. I mean, why should I have given him publishing money? It’s not as though Elvis was an up-and-coming, struggling artist. Elvis didn’t need the push. My song was already a standard. I knew it, and I really didn’t care whether or not anybody else ever recorded it. I just didn’t care.”

Despite Presley’s obvious affection for her song, the two artists never met, though she says she would have loved to. “But I’m sure we would not have become friends,” she says with a laugh. And even though Sainte-Marie hasn’t loved every cover treatment her songs have received, she has gained an important perspective that she offers up to other songwriters and artists. “The way I look at it now is, you can’t kill a good song. That’s one of the beautiful things about music.”

To this day, Sainte-Marie’s friend Randy Bachman (of The Guess Who and Bachman–Turner Overdrive) is impressed by her versatility as a songwriter. “When your songs get recorded by Elvis and Bobby Darin, really big heavyweight dudes, that is an absolute testament to how great your songwriting is,” Bachman says. “She’s very much like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or like Neil Young, and I try to be like that too, but her next song or record is not at all like any previous ones. There’s a changing songwriting format, even though the themes are usually peace, love, and rebellion against the evils in the world.”