SAINTE-MARIE’S 1972 ALBUM Moonshot was another departure for the young artist, thanks to her new collaboration with Norbert Putnam. Coincidentally, Presley and his team had first called Sainte-Marie while she was in the studio with Putnam, who’d recorded with Presley in 1965. Putnam had just produced Joan Baez’s last Vanguard album, 1971’s Blessed Are . . . and had played bass for the psychedelic pop band the Neon Philharmonic in 1967. In 1970, he and piano player David Briggs started Nashville’s Quadrafonic Sound Studio, where Neil Young’s Harvest was recorded, as well as Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” and countless other hit rock records.

Working with Putnam was something of a revelation for Sainte-Marie. They even fell in love for a little while, living together in Nashville, and their creative partnership made for some of her most exhilarating forays into funk, soul, and rock. The first track on Moonshot, “Not the Lovin’ Kind” is one of those songs, a lost gem that, in an alternative history, would have become a much-covered classic by the likes of Heart and Jefferson Airplane and Led Zeppelin. It’s a bracing, bruising rock song that embraces soul, country, and psychedelic flourishes. Sainte-Marie spits out every line with a snarl and some snark, and you can practically hear her eyes rolling at the excuses of the male subject on the receiving end of these lyrics, but also at her song’s narrator for succumbing to his nonsense one too many times. “I think I’ve learned your secret/to keep from getting burned,” she sings. “Love for you is a matter of no deposit and no return.”

Putnam and Sainte-Marie were well matched in many ways, not the least of which was a shared love of soul-baring vocal performances. “I read an interview where Norbert said that, for him, it’s always all about the emotion of the song and the singer in the song, and I always loved him for that. If [the emotions] are not there, then the record’s no good,” she says. “I can appreciate non-emotional music—you know, some music is real mathematical—but the emotion that comes through songs is always what’s most important to me. And Norbert had pointed out, in whatever article that was, that most producers don’t even think about that. And I guess maybe he’s right. It’s just not talked about in music production schools or camps, the emotion of a song.”

Sainte-Marie made four albums with Putnam—1972’s Moonshot and 1973’s Quiet Places, both on Vanguard, and 1974’s Buffy and 1975’s Changing Woman, both on MCA. She left Vanguard once and for all after Quiet Places, thanks to her lawyer, Abe Somer, who worked to get her released from her contract—something she’d wanted since the The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Vol. 2 fiasco. In 1974, Vanguard released yet another compilation, Native North American Child, which Sainte-Marie says was done without her agreement. “If I had wanted to make an all-Indian album, it sure wouldn’t have been this one and it sure wouldn’t have had [Vanguard] in charge,” she says.

Working with Putnam, however, made a world of difference. It made her a better singer, she says, as did working with musicians who genuinely loved the music. It was the first time she’d worked with a band of like-minded individuals, and it was as if she’d unlocked a door to a secret garden. The players were largely from Putnam’s own band, Area Code 615, or Putnam’s friends, and included the likes of his studio partner David Briggs as well as Billy Sanford, Kenny Buttrey, Charlie McCoy, and Eddie Hinton. She felt comfortable talking about music with them because they too were natural players, often self-taught just like her.

“Working with Norbert and his band was easy,” Sainte-Marie says. “It was friendly; it was no struggle at all. I didn’t have a record label breathing down my neck, and I didn’t have snobby musicians trying to make me feel like less because I couldn’t read music. The musicians in Nashville approached music conversations the same way I did in that they didn’t talk the way that music-school musicians usually talk, which is kind of like lawyer-ese. But in Nashville, we thought of how the chords related to each other. It’s a much more natural way of relating to music. So I felt comfortable there; it was a lot of fun, and I think it shows in the music. The passion that I had for those songs—I couldn’t have done that in New York with Maynard Solomon in the room. It wouldn’t have happened. It had to be loose and fun. It was beautiful.”

Sainte-Marie was thrilled to finally work collaboratively with other musicians. “I didn’t have a band not because I didn’t want a band, but who the fuck’s going to play with me?” She laughs. “I mean, in 1960 or something, who’s going to play along with ‘Cod’ine?’ Who’s going to play along with ‘Universal Soldier?’ I didn’t know anybody, and boys in bands being the way they were then—you can see how that wouldn’t have happened.”

The musicians in Nashville proved the exception. Sainte-Marie acknowledges that Greenwich Village had terrific musicians, but they were working for other people, and she wasn’t about to steal somebody else’s band. (“It has happened to me,” she says, “but I’ve never done that.”) Vanguard co-owner and Sainte-Marie’s “somewhat distant producer” Maynard Solomon paired her with a handful of musicians, but she felt like they were just working another job. And no one tried to position her as the front person of a band.

“I would have loved it, though!” Sainte-Marie says. “When Bob Dylan went to play with The Band, I was thrilled. Some of my favorite songs were [those they did] together.” She holds up The Band’s “The Weight,” written by Robbie Robertson, as one of the best rock songs ever written, and the admiration between the two songwriters is mutual.

“I found out about Buffy after I joined up with Bob Dylan and was first introduced to the folk music world,” Robbie Robertson says. “When I heard her, I thought she had such a unique voice and delivery, and I liked that she was singing songs with strong meaning. On top of her talent and great voice, she was also a First Nations artist, and that made me want to discover more and more about her music and story. Years later, when we did get to work together, I was even more impressed with her artistic durability, powerful advocacy, and downright coolness.”

The experience of finally finding musicians, collaborative and creative soul mates to help execute Sainte-Marie’s vision proved liberating in ways she never anticipated. “Working with Norbert’s band freed me somehow to let ’er rip like I did from the very beginning, but their tonality was so superb, it was real easy to play with them,” she says. “Just playing with the six strings of a guitar—which can go out of tune in the middle of a song—is not nearly as secure as playing with a band who are all zoned in on A440 [tuning standard for musical pitch]. But I don’t want to portray that as restrictive in any way. It was expansive, not restrictive. I lost none of that original emotion or passion, and I didn’t learn how to sing vanilla. It was just so much fun working with them because I sang all the time and more and more of my musical wishes came true. Norbert had written one of the most beautiful melodies I ever heard and I added words. It’s called ‘Nobody Will Ever Know It’s Real but You’ and it’s my favorite vocal of my whole career.”

Sainte-Marie’s first real, full-band touring experiences happened with Putnam and his band. She remembers one show around 1972 or 1973 in Boulder, Colorado, in a large club. “I loved it! It was rockin’, it was hot. It was so good. I was doing things like ‘Sweet Little Vera,’ ‘Not the Lovin’ Kind,’ ‘Sweet Fast Hooker Blues,’ ‘Generation,’ and ‘Moonshot.’ It cost me a fortune because not only were there string players and backup singers, there were horns, too. I had a seventeen-piece band on the road. It was only for about a week. I was wearing fancy short skirts and these stupidly high, five-inch glorious rhinestone platforms.”

She remembers playing a concert on that tour at either Carnegie Hall or Philharmonic Hall, she can’t remember which, with Norbert’s band and sax legend David Sanborn. “The first few songs I did solo, and Norbert told me afterwards that they were all nervous, they were just shaking in the wings as I did my solos. Somebody said, ‘Oh my god, how are we going to follow this? She’s carrying it.’ They were worried that the audience was going to hate them when they came out onstage because the solos were so strong, but, actually, everybody loved it. I just couldn’t afford to keep it up financially.”

Musically, Sainte-Marie was flying high, but that success didn’t come without some problems. Long before email, Sainte-Marie received a lot of fan mail, sometimes hundreds of pieces a day. Most of the time they were nice letters, and occasionally she would answer them. For the most part, she liked to hear from people who were inspired by her music. She got phone calls or met people who wanted to get backstage to meet her in person. Fans liked to send her presents, and she didn’t think too much about it—at first. But on one of her tours with the Nashville band she experienced the first of two significant experiences she had with stalkers.

She and the band were in Atlanta, Georgia, and after their show, they returned to their motel, a two-storey building where every room opens onto a common walkway. Someone started to talk to her from outside her door, so she telephoned her drummer down the hall and asked him to look outside. He saw a man and called security. The man went away, and Sainte-Marie didn’t think too much about it—until they got to Boulder and one of the roadies found a note on the rental car from the man who’d been trying to see her. The front of the car had been smashed in with a baseball bat. They called the police, but continued on with the tour.

When they got back to Nashville, they resumed recording in Putnam’s Quadrafonic Studio. Guitarist Eddie Hinton noticed something weird. “He came in and said, ‘Norbert, do you know anything about that truck that’s parked across the street? It’s been there for a couple of days while you guys have been recording.’” Putnam didn’t know, so they called the police who arrived and scoped out the situation. They came into the studio and asked Sainte-Marie if she knew the man who owned the truck.

“I knew his name because he had been sending things to the studio, like two big boxes of vintage clothes he thought I would like,” Sainte-Marie explains. “This guy was really trying to get my attention. I had been nice, sending him thank-you notes.” She laughs at her own innocence.

Sainte-Marie recalls the police explaining the situation to her. “‘Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to have to go out and confront this guy. And the idea is to turn him off completely and make him think that you are just the worst person in the world, so think something up. Be cold as ice, a real bitchy person who wants nothing to do with him. No sympathy, no turn on, no nothing.’”

She remembers thinking, “Oh, my god,” but she went out to his truck to confront him. “The place was fitted up like a wedding caravan,” she says. “It was all fancy with lace and pictures. He thought that I was his wife in his last life and all this stuff. It was really sick.” She had spoken to him once before on the phone. He’d found out her phone number and called her, and she didn’t know who he was but he had a big, deep voice. She’d imagined him as a massive guy, an intimidating figure who the police would need to be careful around. He wasn’t.

“He was this little skinny hippie with dirty hair, really kind of strange,” Sainte-Marie says. “He asked me if I was still an Indian or was I just a hippie now. It was just weird. So I was very cold [to him] and then went back into the studio. When the police came in later they said, ‘Well, we don’t think you’re going to hear from him anymore.’ They told him to stay out of the state.” It was dramatic, but she wasn’t traumatized. “I was a little concerned,” she recalls. But a few years later, another “super fan” with a criminal history prompted Sainte-Marie to call in the FBI.

“I used to get love letters from this guy. I did not answer them, and I told the post office that if I got any packages from this guy not to accept them, because he had been involved in mail bombings.” Sainte-Marie is pretty sure that the person who told her that her stalker was also a mail bomber was Doug Weston, owner of the Troubadour, the famous Los Angeles club that helped establish many of the major musicians and bands of the sixties and seventies. Weston knew the man and gave Sainte-Marie the heads-up.

One day in Hawai‘i, after returning from touring, she inadvertently signed for packages that included one of his. “When I saw who it was from, I was still at the post office. I said, ‘No, no, no, I’m not going to take that.’ The postmaster came out and, what a shithead, he refused to let me give it back because I had mistakenly signed off on a package from this nutcase.” Sainte-Marie’s lawyer called in the FBI and they handled the matter.

In the early- to mid-1970s, she had less dramatic, if equally memorable, tours. One of Sainte-Marie’s favorite adventures was a handful of gala concerts in support of UNICEF. While on tour, she appeared in both Europe and Asia with other celebrities such as Dinah Shore, Dusty Springfield, Danny Kaye, Harry Belafonte, and Marlon Brando. Everyone was paid thirty-five dollars a day, whether they were a celebrity or a driver. One of the highlights was a stop in Amsterdam featuring one of Sainte-Marie’s favorite flamenco guitarists, known as Manitas de Plata (Little Hands of Silver). He was born Ricardo Baliardo in a caravan in southern France. Although he played Spanish guitar, he didn’t speak the language; he and his family were Basque.

“I kind of identified with them in a funny way,” she remembers. “They were between cultures like I was. I was an Indian with too much education. I was a folk singer from neither a WASP nor Jewish background. I was something else. Manitas was an unusual fit, and so was I.”

Sainte-Marie had been a fan of flamenco music since she’d idolized Carmen Amaya in college. She had seen Manitas de Plata perform in New York, but this was the first time they’d shared a bill. As they waited in the big theater for the rehearsal to get underway, they grew restless. “It just takes forever, so we all decided, ‘Aw, heck with this. Let’s go down in the basement where the catering was,’” Sainte-Marie remembers. “They [de Plata and the band, consisting of de Plata’s nephews] were playing flamenco and I was dancing and singing fake flamenco in French, and somehow it fit. I have this flamenco vein that goes through me to this day. I take a dance class on Wednesdays. I practice secret flamenco. I’m a closet flamenco singer, and I take dance lessons because it’s so much fun, and it’s just so beautiful. Manitas de Plata’s nephews went on to become the Gipsy Kings.”

But Manitas de Plata wasn’t the only hero she met while touring. Sainte-Marie was also a huge fan of sixties-and seventies-era Chinese cinema. She loved the language, the costumes, the makeup—everything. “I had a crush on a couple of Chinese movie stars,” she says with a laugh. “Where I live in Hawai‘i, my local theater used to show Chinese movies and I would go all the time.” When she was invited to perform in Hong Kong in the early 1970s, she was paired with Bruce Lee, who acted as her celebrity ambassador. “He was very nice to me, and he invited me over to where they were filming the nunchaku scenes in Enter the Dragon,” she recalls. “His arms were all bruised, and he was laughing about it. He said, ‘We’ve been working on this for days!’ just trying to get it right in one take. He was all bruised up. He was very nice and a brilliant person. I think he was just so wonderful, and it’s too bad he died so young.”

And Sainte-Marie wasn’t just meeting other celebrities and artists. She was also working as an activist to support the increasingly powerful young Indigenous leaders rising up against their oppressors—namely, Sainte-Marie says, “the money and power behind local, state, and the U.S. governments’ mining and ranching interests in Indian country.”