Sept 16 AOTD: Robbie Robertson - Music for the Native Americans

Robbie Robertson - Music for the Native Americans 

1994





















Link to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVMW9huVqCQ&list=PLD82F19E4CF1957E6

In 1994, Ted Turner commissioned a film documentary on Native Americans for his own network.  Seeking to avoid just using straightforward recordings of Indians singing and chanting, which might wear out in accompaniment with his visual series, he, instead, asked Robbie Robertson of The Band to record the music.

The half Mohawk guitar slinger and songwriter ("The Night They Drove Ol Dixie Down") recruited some of the best Native American and Native Canadian singers and an army of musicians and producers to make one of the best albums of the 90s.

The album opens with "Coyote Dance," and one of the album's features is immediately explored: a combination of Native chants, new age productions and droning synths and drums swirl together like eddies in a prairie stream. 

The next song features the morning bird-like vocals of Pura Fe, Soni, Jen of Ulali.
Translation: 

A hundred years have passed
Yet I hear the distant beat of my father's drums.
I hear his drums throughout the land.
His beat I feel within my heart.
The drum shall beat
so my heart shall beat.
And I shall live a hundred thousand years.

Next up ... We finally get to hear the soft, gravelly vocals of Robbie himself on "Ghost Dance," a wonderful lyric-retelling of the resistance that eventually led up Wounded Knee, which is referenced in the song.  The background vocals emerge wisp-like from the music, mirroring the rising spirits he sings of.  And when he introduces the breakdown to sing of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, it feels like trotting horses being reigned in ... and then slowly released again, until the end when said horses are brought to a stand with the cessation of drums and a forlorn, spoken, "We used to the ghost dance; we don't sing them kind of songs no more."

Much of the music is slower or mid-tempo, like "Vanishing Breed," and in songs like these we often hear Robbie's guitar work subtly snaking its way up through the mix to nestle alongside flutes, organs or hand drums - all of it amplified to fill out a canyon wide, cinematic soundscape.

Robertson feels as much like a documenting storyteller as a singer-songwriter on songs like "It is a Good Day to Die."  That dark voice lending gravitas to his subjects of loss, longing, and remorse.

Other highlights on the album include moments when Robertson strips it back to acoustic or electric guitar with simple accompaniment - perhaps just a violin and a drum - like "Akua Tuta," and "Words of Fire, Deeds of Blood." The space between the vocals and instruments often give more weight to the solos and voices. In the latter, the drums echo with enough reverb to shake your speakers ... if you turn it up. Perhaps most effective of all is "Ancestor Song," where Robertson and his production team disappear to leave only drums and chanting.

On The Band's website, this translation is given for Cherokee Morning Song:

We n' de ya ho
Freely translated: "A we n'" (I am), "de" (of), "Yauh" --the-- (Great Spirit), "Ho" (it is so).
Written as: A we n' de Yauh ho (I am of the Great Spirit, Ho!).
This language stems from very ancient Cherokee

The entire album works as transport back through time, back through the mist, back through a history of beauty and sadness.  It is ancient and mystical, a world music album dug up from our own backyard by a Canadian native, an American immigrant, a half mohawk, who guides us on this Native journey with ancient voice and modern guitar. Take the reigns and ride with him.