Buffy Sainte-Marie still going strong after all these years
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Buffy has been going strong for decades and she has new projects on the go.
WINNIPEG, MB-Perhaps the most successful and longest-running Native American singer is none other than Buffy Sainte-Marie. At 73, Buffy is still "on the road" making music and raising issues that affect First Nations.
On a western Canadian tour, Sainte-Marie played a concert recently in Winnipeg at the West End Cultural Centre backed by her all Manitoban and Aboriginal band-Leroy Constant, on bass, Jesse Green, guitar, and Mike Bruyere on drums.
"I'm actually working on a new album right now," Buffy told the Winnipeg Free Press via phone from her home in Hawaii. "I was just in Nashville and Toronto and L.A., where I was interviewing producers to co-produce with."
When she first hit the trail back in the 60s, touring colleges, reservations, and concert halls across the U.S. and Canada, she shocked her audiences by breaking Native stereotypes. This singer-songwriter not only was a musician but also an educator and activist and went on to write such classics as "Universal Soldier," "Until It's Time For You To Go," and "Co'dine."
Sainte-Marie has produced 17 albums. She's also an Oscar winner having won for the song "Up Where We Belong" from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.
"I got a lot of college degrees but it's not that high-falutin,' she told Jen Zoratti of the Free Press. "It's just about splashing paint, or words. Painting, music, dancing-it's all play. What I like, I keep; what I don't, I forget. If we're made in the image of the Creator, then we're meant to be creative," she said. "I can bake a cake or learn a dance and be just as happy."
