Some Favorite Recordings

This is one of the first two record albums I put in my collection, I think in 1958.

Writing Buffy Sainte-Marie bio 'life-changing' for author Andrea Warner

She's a folk music icon, an activist and an Oscar and Polaris Prize winner. So why hadn't anyone written Buffy Sainte-Marie's biography?

When Andrea Warner noticed there were piles of books out about artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but none about Sainte-Marie's life, she decided to change that.

"You start to think about what is Canadian music, who counts as Canadian, and who has been left out of that equation."

Buffy Sainte-Marie and her official biographer Andrea Warner. (Greystone Books)

Warner, who works at CBC Music in Vancouver, said she has always been interested in writing about people who have been unrepresented, including women, queer voices, POC and Indigenous musicians.


"Particularly, as a white settler in Canada. It's not about me bringing those stories to light at all, it's me making spaces for those voices and using my privilege in any way that I can."

Music is her map
Warner was granted exclusive access to the icon; speaking with her on the phone twice a week for two hours at a time and even riding in the van with Sainte-Marie and her band on tour. She also listened to her music to find clues about Sainte-Marie's life.

"Every song of hers, whether it's about Indigenous rights, Indigenous history, or about love or the intersection of those two. Whether it's about historical things or science or technology or the environment, every song is an education," she said.

"It's all there. She's provided this amazing map, it's all there in every song."

She said a perfect example of this is Sainte-Marie's first record and single, It's My Way! Warner said that album is the most important record of the 1964 folk era and so clearly articulated what was important to the Cree singer/songwriter.

"She's a very young woman. She's coming out of a traumatic background, a traumatic childhood. She's an Indigenous woman in a largely white world of college and university," she said, adding the song would be called a feminist anthem if it was released today.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography (Greystone Books)
"She's also articulating for herself very clearly that the way to really find your place in the world is to cut your own path, to make your own way."

Warner said the most memorable moment for her while writing the book was the chapter about her troubled seven-year marriage to Jack Nitzsche, whom Sainte-Marie has never spoken about in media.

It's a conversation the two women saved for last.

"It's such a powerful chapter in her life, it's a powerful chapter in the book and it's a really empowering chapter for a lot women who, we realize, are very strong, strong, strong people and we can still end up in situations that we ask ourselves how did this even happen? How did we get here and how do we extricate ourselves?"

For Warner, writing the book has forever changed her.

"I'm so lucky," she said laughing. "It means so much to me to have people who've have already read this and said to me 'I knew she was incredible' but they didn't know the extent of just how incredible she is."

Happy 92nd birthday

Will the Circle be Unbroken

Dick Dale has died

Idiot Wind

Traces of Texas
5 mins ·
The Texas Quote of the Day comes from Asleep At the Wheel's Ray Benson:

"The more I talked it over with friends, the more a conviction took hold: I was going to form a working-class country band and be accepted, even though I was not one of those people. I considered it a grand and noble social experiment. If a Jewish Yankee like me could play this music I loved and find acceptance among the working class, it would be a shining example of brotherhood for all. My ambition was to be a Renaissance man, master of many pursuits: guitarist, singer, songwriter, bandleader, businessman, artist, philanthropist, community leader, and wandering minstrel, all rolled into one.

I wanted to bring this great music back and win over a new generation of kids by presenting it in unexpected ways ----- to take the wide-open spaces of Western swing and decorate them with the flourishes of County Basie-style big-band jazz, say. Or create something like Buck Owens's Buckaroos with Charlie Parker sitting in on saxophone. Or as I put it in my journal at the time, I was going to "complete the circle, bring the roots of country music back to the generation whose parents loved the music, but in the upheaval of the '60s lost its soul to the plastic white-bread culture that drove the kids away from the music."

In short, my goal was nothing less than to rediscover America through music ----- and to have a blast doing it, of course. That was the ride. The only thing thing I didn't have with me yet was a band of like-minded misfits to take with me."

----- Ray Benson on how, in 1969, he decided to pursue a career in Western Swing music, "Come Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country or, The Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel," 2015