Subtitles by explosiveskull
One can't help but notice the rhythms of-or the pulse that was here, that is here, been here.
The feel of Native American is in a lot of rock 'n' roll.
A lot of R&B musicians and blues musicians talked about having Native blood.
The one group that hasn't really been investigated
in terms of their contribution is the Native Americans.
It's interesting how much of the Native American element just filters through.
The mixture of cultures; you never know what's gonna come with it.
And from that sometimes it's very interesting artistic things happen, you know?
From Charlie Patton to Link Wray; Robbie Robertson invented the genre.
Jimi Hendrix, the best in his field, you know; Jesse Ed Davis, everybody wanted him.
Well, that's interesting isn't it?
Our peoples were part of the origin story of blues and jazz and rock of American music,
but we're left out of the story consistently from the beginning.
Figuring out that these people were Indians and then we started to ask ourselves
why didn't anyone else know that?
It's an American story.
It's a human story; don't break it apart.
Pay the respect that is due.
It was that-the sound of that guitar is the key.
Link Wray and that aggression.
The sound of his guitar embodied all my aspirations.
It was the sound of freedom.
Link Wray.
Oh, boy. I've wanted to meet you for a long time.
There might not be a Who were there no Link Wray;
there might not be a Jeff Beck Group... were there no Link Wray.
There might not be a Led Zeppelin if there were no Link Wray.
Pete Townsend thought Link Wray was one of the great guitar players of all time,
that this guy had invented the power chord.
Pete made it new; he put more colour on it, put more weight on it.
Turned it into I Can See For Miles.
♪ I was born down in the country Down where the cotton grows ♪
This is Jim Pewter with, uh, Link and, uh, Black River Swamp is, uh, really a nice tune.
You know that's about a place where I was born, down in North Carolina.
- Oh, yeah? - Yeah.
I'm from North Carolina.
And I'm out in the country of Dunn.
And Dunn's a real small place but I lived in the country
in this place called Black River.
♪ There's a place down in the country. ♪
♪ Where the pine trees grow so tall ♪
And they struggled; they were very poor
and I'm sure he probably fished in the pond
to try to get food because,
um, you know it was-times were really rough.
♪ Stretchin' across Black River Swamp ♪
He's got Shawnee on there; Native American.
You didn't go around telling everybody you were Native American;
everybody hid it because of the way other people looked down on them.
Link said that he hid under the bed one day
because they could hear the KKK coming through;
because, like all cowards, they would come at night
and they would terrorize people when they least expected it.
♪ I can hear them bullfrogs croaking ♪
The Ku Klux Klan was after anybody who wasn't white.
♪ In the blackness of the night ♪
And if you were known to be an Indian,
uh, you were just as susceptible as any African-American person.
My Shawnee mommy, she went out into the fields and was preaching to the blacks
and to the Cherokee Indians and poor whites saying,
"You keep your morals high; believe in God." You know.
And me and my brothers we were singing, you know,
Will The Circle Be Unbroken
and all those gospel songs behind my mom you know,
when she was out there preaching.
I was, uh, taught by a black man called Hambone who was raised up in the circus
and he could play everything, you know.
And, uh, he taught me how to play the blues, you know, and I started off from there
and then I started paying bands, you know, to let me sit in with them
so I could get better, you know.
Were there early, um, rock 'n' roll influences?
I mean you were among some of the...
There was no rock 'n' roll then.
I was doing this hop at this record hop in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1957.
The kids were gathered around in this arena
and they were yelling for, uh, the stroll.
Link says, "I don't know a stroll."
I said, "I don't know a stroll."
And Doug said, "I know the beat behind one.
Ba-bow" And you thi-you know.
So I said, "OK." Then I went like this.
And then my God, man, they're watching me.
You know. He said, "Bam!" I went.
It's in the middle of the night and the radio's on and here comes this sound, you know,
that makes you levitate out of bed about four feet.
What is he doing?
There's no sound like that nowhere on the air.
It changed everything.
Rumble made an indelible mark on the whole evolution of where rock 'n' roll was gonna go.
And then I found out that he was an Indian.
That was the rawest form of the kind of guitar
that a lot of the guys that I listen to-
it's where it started. You know?
And it even still sounds better when he does it. You know?
I was in the cafeteria and on the university P.A. system
I heard "Bam, bam, bam; domp, domp, domp, domp."
I said, "What? Whoa, what is that?"
Rumble had the power to push me over the edge and it did help me say,
"Fuck it. I'm gonna be a musician."
I think Link Wray purely loved rock 'n' roll and felt
pissed off and annoyed and disappointed
that in some ways because he was Shawnee, half-Shawnee,
and his family had been treated so badly
he took that bitterness and created something that was not reductive but proactive.
And the idea Rumble just from a superficial, almost reactionary level
is like the fight, right?
But for me it means to disrupt, to roar, to be active.
So Link Wray announced with the Rumble that there was a shift happening in culture.
You know, this is not going to be the bop and the stroll it's going to be the Rumble.
Here comes Link Wray with the theme song of juvenile delinquency.
You know. "Hey, rumble."
I was surprised it got any airplay.
And to be honest I mean I'm not surprised it was banned.
He is the only person who has an instrumental, no words, banned
for fear it would incite teenage gang violence.
It was the sound, the chord progressions;
that was the thing.
It was the way they didn't understand the feedback; it was the groove.
It was-it was so many things that turned people off.
You know, everybody can't be Pat Boone. You know what I mean?
His influence was so immense.
Every musician in the world loves Link Wray.
I don't know why the rest of the world hasn't figured that out.
♪ Kick out the jams, motherfucker! ♪
In the MC5, we would do these recording sessions and the engineers would always say,
"Oh, it's all distorted, man.
You punks-aw, you're playing the amp too loud."
And I'd say, "Yes, I want it distorted; that's what I want."
"No, no; you want it clean like at Motown so it goes 'chink'."
I said, "No, I want it to go like Link Wray.
You know, I want that-that fuzz; I want the distortion."
Link Wray's certainly one of the architects of my sound and the MC5 sound,
and a thousand other rock guitar players since then.
I mean, you know, if you trace-if you connect the dots back, you know...
so you can trace heavy metal and punk rock and all that back to The Clash
and The Ramones; uh, the New York Dolls, The MC5 and a few others.
And then before that, who was there, you know?
And he was one of the first that really had a tone that pointed a way to the future.
Link Wray is huge on all modern electric guitar players.
If they're saying he didn't influence, uh, they're lying.
Thank you very much!
In the whole southeast area what we all know, what we've heard through our own families,
is that back when first contact happened,
we had a very specific style of singing.
And you can hear the spirit of some of the old music
before plantations and slavery and so forth, and colonization.
People are really shocked when they hear the traditional music of the southeast.
They're, like, "That's Indian music? I thought that was African music."
The land of the southeast itself informs the sound.
We hear the birds here.
We hear the water here, the rivers, the canoe sounds.
And that informs what comes out of our mouth.
All of American music that came from the south was informed by our land and therefore by us.
A music by Native people presented a threat, was seen as dangerous.
And people were arrested, singers and dancers incarcerated for performing this music;
treaty-guaranteed rations withheld from them.
The Federal government begins passing law after law in an effort to control Native people
in every way that you can imagine.
They went after every part of our culture
so of course they're gonna go after the music
because it's an integral aspect of our culture.
Because back in that time, in those times, everybody had a morning song to greet the day.
They were songs of ancestry; they were songs of the old way.
They went after our culture.
It was genocide and they wanted to erase every
cultural perception of reality that we had.
On December 29th, 1890,
the U.S. Army surrounded a number of Ghost Dancers
at Wounded Knee and slaughtered over three hundred,
mostly women and children, but also men
who were participating in the Ghost Dance.
And this is essentially the beginning of the banning
of Native music in the United States.
When I hear stories about Wovoka creating the Ghost Dance,
the dance that would make the Native Americans invulnerable to the bullets of the white man
so that they could rise up from the reservations
and kill off their oppressors; they were that desperate.
Was what music the blues?
It might not have sounded like it, but baby, that was the blues.
That was the blues.
Most people in America, what little they have of Mardi Gras
is drunken white people on Bourbon Street packed wall-to-wall
hollering at some woman to show her tits. You know?
This doesn't have anything to do with Mardi Gras.
If you want to witness and participate in the real Mardi Gras,
you have to go to the the heart of the ghetto; that's the staging area.
When my family came up from my home in Louisiana, they migrated during the time when, uh,
you know, things was rough for the Indians so they came to New Orleans
and they passed off as black because they was dark-skinned.
And they never even talked about it; they'd never mention it because, you know,
they were scared because they didn't want to get sent to the reservation.
Big Chief! Big Chief!
Hey boy! What they say!
Mardi Gras more than a hell of a day.
But Mardi Gras morning when Indians come
we all gonna get together to have some fun.
♪ I'm gonna take 'em downtown! ♪
♪ Early in the mornin'! ♪
♪ I'm gonna take 'em downtown! ♪
Early in the mornin'!
Seeing the Indians at Carnival was getting to know who I was.
That was the only time that black men could put on feathers.
We're all a combination of indigenous people and indigenous people of Africa.
It was a Muscogeeon village through this area.
Our music is called Stomp Dance and what you hear first is the calling,
a call and response
where the leader calls out and then the men answer.
When you hear that up against blues, rock, jazz, it's part of the origin.
Everybody in the neighbourhood, everybody has grown up on this;
they've been doing this a hundred and fifty years.
Basically they're in there masking as black people in daily life.
Because the Indians were treated even worse than the slaves.
When European settlers came here, they first enslaved the Indians, lots of them.
And they figured out the best way to do this is to ship the men elsewhere.
Being hunter-gatherer societies uh, they knew how to escape and how to evade the raiders
and how to come back and fight. So, you ship them into the Caribbean ships,
some of them to Africa, keep the women here.
And then later on, bring in African slaves.
Ninety percent of the people in the ships coming from Africa on some of those ships were men.
Who did they have children with?
And this is why eighty-five percent of African-Americans who have been in this country
before the Civil War claim Native American ancestry.
And all of them almost say great-grandmother
on the mother's line.
And runaway slaves would be taken in
on different Indian reservations.
They're like, aw, come on, man, you know, you can hang out with us; we'll hide you.
And the next thing you knew, there was these little black Indians running around.
Everyone that was not white,
was classified as "coloured,"
so whether you were Indian or black, you became coloured.
If you had ten percent African, you're considered black.
You'd be ninety percent Indian, but you're considered black.
Why? Well, because it prevents Native Americans from making claims to the land...
and taking back what was stolen.
And if they claimed their land and claimed Indian, they could be shot.
When the African poly rhythms and a Native American,
four on the floor came together.
That was the beginning of what became American music.
To me, I think of-of gumbo, which is the quintessential New Orleans food.
When I was growing up, gumbo was you put everything you had in a pot.
All that stuff together makes this great meal.
I'm part Native American, part African by way of Haiti, part French, part Italian,
and that's kind of what New Orleans is, and it comes out so flavourful.
Giacomo Fina Ne is what they say, Big Chief coming,
so tell them, better get out the way.
New Orleans, the home of the strong, home of the brave,
so don't bother nobody with a feather in their head.
They bring lightning in the morning, they won't bow down,
tambourine rain is such a beautiful sound.
Uptown lightning it comes down
when my Chief on the street steps
the thunder all beneath his feet.
His suit can't be beat,
That child wild from the sun to the night
And when he opens such a beautiful sight.
♪ Here comes the end Just let 'em through ♪
For me it was just a huge revelation that the banjo is an African instrument.
The banjo for the first hundred years of its existence was not a white instrument,
you know, at all, it was a plantation instrument.
Our music is very much what you would hear.
It's-I've heard people call it pre-blues.
And so it really sounds very much like the roots of blues music.
♪ Baby, saddle my pony ♪
♪ Hitch up my black mare ♪
♪ Baby, saddle up my pony ♪
♪ Hitch up my black mare ♪
Blues buffs, blues scholars, although they can't really agree on anything,
if they were forced into a room and they had to identify, you know,
perhaps the most singularly important blues guitarist, singer, songwriter,
the whole package, the greatest one that ever was um, in the early 20th Century,
if you tried to convince them to come up with that answer, they'd probably say Charley Patton.
He was the grandfather to all of the Delta Blues guys.
No matter how rough those recordings are or how hard it is to listen to,
there's nothing as immediate as listening to that stuff.
It's like a bomb went off. I mean, his sound is so guttural,
it sounds like what I imagine that time must have felt like.
Like he's just, he's just getting it out.
You know, he's not even trying to make it pretty. It's just as raw as it gets.
He was a profound influence on Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Jack White, Bonnie Raitt,
the list goes on and on and on.
Charley Patton was an Indian.
And he was the baddest mother-fucker in the world.
Howlin Wolf.
He was from the area of the Mississippi Delta,
which is an area that is rich in Blues history.
It's not far from the Choctaw country.
It's very likely that Charley Patton was of Choctaw ancestry.
Charley Patton's family has an oral tradition
of Native ancestry, of white ancestry,
Creole ancestry, African-American ancestry.
All of those people made Patton who he was.
See, so when I hear this, it's Indian music to me, you know.
And that rhythm...
I love Charley Patton, his spirit and his music,
it just connects me right back
to where I come from, you know? I can hear all those old traditional songs.
Do you hear it?
That's Indian music.
With a guitar, you know.
That's where it went, you know? That's where traditional music went.
It went like this.
I hear it in the singing.
I hear it in the singing and I hear it in the rhythm
because he plays the guitar like a drum.
It was illegal to own a drum in plantation slavery America.
You could not own a drum.
Or you will be killed because a drum was an insurrectionary instrument.
You could communicate to people, you could organize people over distances for rebellion,
You know? So that's why Charley Patton had to play drum on his guitar.
Patton was born during some of the worst racial violence in the United States,
so one of the ways that you could perhaps get away
from some of the worst of the racial violence
was to be secure inside of a world such as here at Dockery.
It was a place where people could go and make money.
The Dockery Plantation offered people more
than they were getting in their home communities in Mississippi.
And that's why Patton's family moved there
because they could have a better life for themselves.
There were Choctaw folks that moved there;
there were African-American folks;
there were Europeans that worked there.
Charley Patton would have heard a combination of influences
that led to the emergence of his guitar playing style.
He was not very much into farm labour,
but you didn't have too many other opportunities.
They would do gigs. It would be, you know, Saturday night at somebody's house,
somebody's back porch. Play all night, play for some drinks.
Maybe somebody would fry some fish.
After they got out of the church, even the reverends
would go take their girls
and go to the juke joints, you know, where they had sex and food
and gambling and all that stuff.
Back then, rich and poor had to go to juke joints if they wanted to party.
Son House would say, you know, Patton would throw the guitar up in the air
and catch it and, you know, not miss a beat.
And just think, he's been working all week;
and you ain't heard nothing but lightning and birds and wind.
And all of a sudden, you hear somebody go
And I mean, the hair's probably standing up on the back of your neck.
He was doing Jimi Hendrix long before Jimi.
Charley Patton may have started the whole showmanship thing.
But, you know, they had to find their own identity;
they had to separate themselves from the other guys.
I mean, there was probably a lot of guys out there trying
to not have to work in the cotton field, you know what I mean?
It's like, same as today, OK? We're all trying to not work in that cotton field, right?
The big deal about Dockery is that Charley was here for such a long time
that people came to him and he took the time to teach them how to play.
He taught Pop Staples how to play when he was a child.
Sun House was another one that came here and played.
That Howlin' Wolf came here as a youngster.
A man came through the plantation picking a guitar called Charley Patton,
and I liked his sound.
Every night that I'd get off from work, I'd go to his house
and he'd learn me how to pick the guitar. So I got good with it.
Wolf was the guy who basically took Patton's music into the electric realm.
The Stones got Howlin' Wolf to come.
You can see Brian Jones' face.
He's just like, "Oh my God, we actually pulled this scam off
and we got Howlin' Wolf to do this show."
Tell us something about him, Brian.
Well, when we first started playing together
we started playing because we wanted to play Rhythm and Blues
and Howlin' Wolf was one of our greatest idols
and it's a great pleasure to find he's been booked on this show tonight.
So I think it's time we shut up and had Howlin' Wolf onstage!
Yeah I agree, let's get him out, Howlin' Wolf, bring him on!
♪ How many more years Do I have to let you dog me around? ♪
♪ I would rather be dead ♪
And once again, that mystery of what it is and how awesome it is
goes right back down to Charley Patton and Dockery Farms.
America didn't let the blues reach the white kids until the British guys started playing it,
then they thought it was something new the British guys was bringing here.
The Stones, the Beatles and whoever else was picking up a guitar.
There's a definite thread from Charley Patton, Howlin Wolf to Led Zeppelin, you know,
it went like that basically.
Jimmy Page will tell you that if you ask him.
♪ I'm gonna leave you cause it's high time ♪
♪ Somebody else is beatin' my time ♪
♪ But you never hear me cry ♪
♪ As long as you live, you'll be dead if you die ♪
Well, I can't help it.
Oh fuck, I don't know how it goes.
It's all the same; I can't tell where to come in.
♪ I'm gonna leave you cause it's high time ♪
♪ Somebody else is beatin' my time ♪
Mildred began singing in speakeasies, and she became big in speakeasies.
In this little speakeasy that she and Benny the Bootlegger had, she brewed her own beer.
But when Mildred Bailey came to New York
in the late '20s, early '30s
uh, everything was completely segregated.
She knew who the great musicians were and she started recording with black musicians
almost from the moment she got here.
Mildred was a cornerstone.
She serves as a cornerstone in the direction that jazz took.
This was her mother's land for generations before Mildred
and my grandmother was the recipient of ancient music.
On the Coeur D'Alene Reservation, there was no social gathering without singing.
The way the notes are stretched and condensed and move over the bar lines.
Mildred sings from Lover, Come Back to Me
♪ I remember every little thing you used to do ♪
When Mildred Bailey does it, it's hard not to look at the way those glides are used
in the traditional songs of the region where she grew up.
♪ Every road I walk along I've walked along with you ♪
When asked how she came to be the singer that she became,
she pointed to the Indian songs of her youth.
♪ Old rockin' chair's got me ♪
She was one of the great improvisers of jazz.
You know, you say, "Old rocking chair's got me."
You sing it, maybe it's written that way, but it always says,
"Old rocking chair's got me," you know.
You just change it, you know, whatever you feel at the moment.
It's something that you can't learn in school.
I'm eighty years old, you know, what am I talking about, I'm eighty-eight and uh
from sixteen to twenty years old, I was working as a singing waiter
in Astoria, Long Island here and that's the only thing I listened to, was Mildred Bailey.
I was completely influenced by Mildred Bailey.
She sang perfect, for me.
And here's your rocking chair lady, Mildred Bailey!
Hi everybody, come right in and cut yourself a share of kicks around that old rocking chair.
♪ Noah, Noah, let me come in ♪
♪ Doors all fastened and the windows pinned... ♪
She's the first female band singer, period.
And the first female to have a radio show.
♪ Noah said you done lost your track. ♪
Frank Sinatra went up to Julia Rinker at a recording session in the '70s and said,
"I knew your aunt, and she is one of the most significant people
in terms of how I learned to sing and who I emulate to this day." Frank Sinatra said that.
♪ Keep your hand on the plow, hold on! ♪
Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, she had a hand in shaping jazz vocal style.
♪ Wanna get to heaven, I'll tell you how ♪
♪ Keep your hand on the gospel plow! ♪
It's important not just to re-situate Mildred Bailey in that jazz narrative,
but by doing that, we bring the story of the Native American perspective
into that jazz narrative.
Seeing as this is an unlawful assembly. Disperse.
♪ Can you remember the time ♪
♪ That you have held your head high? ♪
♪ And told all of your friends of your Indian claim ♪
♪ Proud good lady and proud good man ♪
I went to Greenwich Village and I was not in show business.
I was a college girl on her way to India and I thought I would try my luck at singing.
And it was folk music time.
♪ Oh, it's written in books and in songs ♪
♪ That we've been mistreated and wronged ♪
All of a sudden the streets were just alive with people
with broader minds than the generation before.
And it was just the perfect time for me, you know.
If it had been a different time, I probably never would have had a career.
♪ And you feel you're a part of these ones... ♪
At the essence, folk music is telling the stories of the day.
And it's telling stories of the day or the people who are most of the time the most excluded,
the most-the most uh, the trampled-upon.
This is a song about a human being who is also an Indian
and if you don't remember his name,
I think you may after this song. It's called Ira Hayes.
The first folk singer signed at Columbia was not Bob Dylan, it was Peter La Farge.
♪ For a thousand years The sparkling water rushed ♪
♪ Till the white man stole their water rights ♪
For natives, for the singer-songwriter, Peter La Farge was the man.
He was addressing the reality we were going through and our attitude towards it.
We were listening to each other's music.
There was a real protest movement going on about Vietnam.
Universal Soldier on, you know, I mean, she was an activist;
she was the first woman of of activism that had an audience.
♪ He's five-foot-two and he's six-feet-four ♪
♪ He fights with missiles and with spears ♪
She was very instrumental in making those images
and those points clear to a very open and willing audience.
♪ And he's fighting in Canada He's fighting in France He's fighting in the USA ♪
Unlike my peers in show business uh, who had never been to a reservation,
and unlike my peers on the reservation who had no clout or power or voice um,
I had those two.
♪ This is not the way we put an end to war. ♪
♪ Old Custer he split his men Well, he won't do that again. ♪
♪ The general, he don't ride well anymore. ♪
Johnny Cash wanted to make a folk record and he had seen La Farge before.
And he said, "I have to meet this musician." And Johnny Cash felt very connected,
and then they hung out and spoke and he said, "I want to take some of your songs
and turn them into a record."
He was in an extremely high moment in his career
coming off the success of Ring of Fire.
♪ I went down, down, down And the flames went higher ♪
♪ And it burns, burns, burns The ring of fire, the ring of fire ♪
And even at that moment, riding the high of these giant hits,
Columbia Records are still trying to block him from making this record.
Johnny was fighting and ready to throw his career away
if they wouldn't put this record out.
He was going to put it out, you know, no matter what they said.
He knew this album was essentially censored and banned.
So Johnny Cash decides to write a letter about his displeasure.
Line after line of scathing indictment of the record industry.
And he himself putting the letter in the record sleeve
and then personally not just mailing the record to the specific DJs,
but appearing in the city when he was performing to the DJ with the record and saying,
"Just give it a chance."
I've got very little Indian blood in me myself,
except in my heart I've got 100% for you tonight.
♪ Gather round me people There's a story I would tell ♪
♪ About a brave young Indian That we should remember well ♪
♪ From the tribe of the Pima Indian ♪
♪ A proud and peaceful band... ♪
Well, I asked the DJs, "Why don't you play Bitter Tears?"
And then it was the same answer, "Well, it makes you feel guilty, you know."
"Uh, I didn't wreck your damn life."
"You know, I didn't take away your damn land, it wasn't me."
I'm, "Well, so what?"
"I'm not telling you did, why don't you put..."
"Well, we can't do that."
Here they were.
They were all hunted down, up this canyon as far as those pine trees are,
across the creek over there.
By America banning that album,
it just closed everyone's conscience
of the American Indian and their struggles.
I was no longer a marginalized person writing Universal Soldier
or talking about Native American issues in a coffee house.
All of a sudden I was talking about those things on big-time television.
And all of a sudden everything disappeared.
All of a sudden there was no interest.
And it was only twenty, twenty-five years later that in Toronto,
a radio broadcaster started an interview by apologizing to me
for having gone along with letters written on White House stationery
commending them for supressing my music, which "deserved to be suppressed."
And that's the way he started the interview
Apparently, I had FBI files and got blacklisted, although I didn't know it at the time.
And later on it was the CIA as well, I understand.
They went after Buffy and they went after a lot of people
at that time just to kind of keep them silenced.
I think I could have been more effective had I not been gagged in the US.
But who was it who owned the newspapers?
Who owned the television stations?
Who owned the radio stations?
Were they going to play Buffy Sainte-Marie? No!
It was the oil companies.
It was people who were digging for uranium, stealing uranium,
transferring it into private hands.
That's who owned all that.
You think that they were going to be making me a star? I don't think so.
Well, what Jimi was doing when he was playing Hear My Train A Comin',
it was for a television show, I think.
No amps, no pedals, no wah-wah's, no tricks, no dancing and no playing with his teeth.
And he's just bringing pure-the power of the earth and history through him.
♪ Waitin' for the train, yeah ♪
He's bringing the Charley Patton, you know, he's bringing uh, the Link Wray,
he's bringing all those things up through him.
Well, I knew he had music in him, because when he was small, his daddy bought him a guitar,
an old guitar for him to play on, you know, around with the boys
and so I knew he was musical.
But I didn't know that he had that much music in him, you see.
My grandma lived to be a hundred years old,
which is um, amazing feat to itself but um,
her father was slave, freed.
Her mother was half Cherokee, and she grew up on the reservation.
So she always kept that um, memory
of being proud of being Cherokee.
Being part Native was very meaningful to my grandmother.
She talked about that a lot and really instilled that in all of us, but especially Jimi.
She was a-a singer, a dancer, and she was in Vaudeville.
She had this beautiful trunk, and it had feathers and boas and velvet,
and Jimi used to love to play in this trunk.
Try on the vests, try on the hats with a huge feather
and beautiful tan suede coats that were full of fringe.
Back then, my room was covered with Jimi posters.
And I used to have to kind of laugh because some of the posters,
they made Jimi really dark, like really like super dark.
And I was just like, he wasn't that dark.
And he was very, very fair and he had caramel coloured skin and beautiful almond-shaped eyes,
and you could definitely tell he had various cultures that he was born with.
The package that was Jimi Hendrix was that indigenous quality that he had in him
that a lot of people don't know that he had in him.
But, you know, to bring that to the stage and celebrate it through his music
and his presence, you know, that adds to the power, man.
So during that period of time, now Indians are in.
The hippies, the flower children emerging.
So they want to be Indians themselves.
When he went up to Woodstock you have the beautiful white jacket with fringe,
with turquoise beading.
Part of it is, yes, it is the '60s, but for him it was much more meaningful than that.
When we reached the site of the Woodstock Festival,
Mitch Mitchell, the drummer, looked out he says, "Oh my goodness!"
he'd never seen that many people before.
And I said, "What is it, Mitch?" And I looked out and said, "Oh no!"
And then Jimi looked out and said, "Hm," with all the wisdom that he had,
I don't know where he got this wisdom, but he said,
"You know, those people are sending a lot of energy up on stage,
so let us take that energy, utilize it, and send it back to them."
I see that we meet again. Hmm. Well, well, well.
And when he's doing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock
it just sounded like everything that had happened up to that point in his life,
in his family's life, it was this amazing collision
of putting what the country was going through or or his generation to sound.
You know, it was a pretty amazing moment.
I think he was including all of his frustration
with civil rights, with racism,
with the war in Vietnam, with political oppression,
and I think they all come out in his playing.
I mean, you hear it. He's painting a picture for you.
All you gotta do is listen.
Some people thought at that time it was sacrilegious.
And my dad got really tense and he wasn't breathing and I was like, "Are you OK?"
And he said.
He kept looking over at the police officer and he said, "I really..." once it was over,
he could breathe, because he thought the police officer was going to arrest him,
because you just didn't do that then.
He was very proud.
I mean, he was very proud of being Native and being African American and being Scottish.
It's part of your legacy; it's part of your heritage; it's part of who you are
and what you want to reflect and represent.
It's kind of the American superhero in a way.
It's like, he's a little bit of everything and uh, and, but none of it's diluted.
It's like he's more powerful because of it.
Yonge Street from when I was very young, it was a centre of music
that I didn't know how things were
in Chicago or Detroit of New York,
but Yonge Street was on fire.
You'd try to listen through the doors or peek through the windows,
and then somebody would go in one of these places
and you would hear the music come flooding out
and it would be like, "Oh, did you hear that?" you know, just those few seconds.
When I was sixteen, Ronnie Hawkins hired me to play in the Hawks.
All of a sudden, they were our Beatles.
These guys could do no wrong. They just killed me.
♪ Hey, Bo Diddley! ♪
And Robbie was just outrageous.
He'd launch into a solo and we'd just stand there and think, "Oh my God, listen to this guy play.
How does he do that?"
Robbie came up with something that I hadn't heard anybody else do.
He just didn't play like anybody else.
My real guitar lessons were at the Six Nation Indian Reserve.
All my cousins, uncles, aunts, everybody, seemed like they could play an instrument.
♪ Oh, sometimes I can see The things you wanted me to be ♪
This mix between a Native kind of music and a country kind of music.
So I thought, well, this is just what you do.
I've got to learn how to do this. I've got to get into this club.
And there was this key expression,
"Be proud you're an Indian, but be careful who you tell."
And I used to tell everybody that one of these days
I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna play music all over the world.
And they'd be like, "You know, we don't want to see you get a broken heart,
because that doesn't happen to people like us."
I was like, "No, no, no, you can't spoil my dream. I'm in the middle of it." You know.
"Don't wake me up now."
And so I went and I pursued these things.
And then joining up with Bob Dylan, and then we're in a musical revolution now.
Now we're doing something that has reverberations around the world.
Don't boo me anymore.
Don't boo me, God they're booing, I can't stand it.
Oh my God, it's hard to get in tune when they're booing!
When Bob decided to take a band out, he chose the Hawks.
Just as the folk world's starting to
finally relate to him, he leaves.
He plugs in, causing enormous reactions.
That group considered electrified rock and roll commercial.
And therefore, a betrayal politically.
And I think they caught the brunt of it.
I think then Dylan says, "Play it fuckin' loud." And they played Like a Rolling Stone.
And Robbie is there literally, I think he said, "Play it fuckin' loud."
Bang! He turned it up.
And they were phenomenal, all right.
This is one of the greatest... the band's greatest tours ever in history.
And people would boo.
Every night in every place we'd play, people would boo and throw stuff at you.
You'd pack up your equipment and you'd go on to the next place
and people would boo you and throw stuff at you.
And you'd think, "What a strange way to make a buck, you know."
Robbie Robertson told me, he says, "We started taping the shows to listen
in the hotel room because we're like, what are we missing here?
Why-why-why are we-why are they booing this?
Because this sounds pretty good to me."
But after a while, we got so we were doing it really well,
and there was an attitude towards the music.
And uh, a violence and a dynamic and something that you just didn't hear anywhere else.
And as that grew, I started to think, which is pretty bold,
we're right, and the world is wrong.
♪ That's when that little love of mine ♪
♪ Dips her donut in my tea ♪
♪ Up on Cripple Creek she sends me ♪
♪ If I spring a leak, she mends me ♪
♪ I don't have to speak; she defends me ♪
♪ A drunkard's dream if I ever did see one. ♪
The entire industry got right back to song-writing and Robbie Robertson,
one of the great song writers of all time, had effectuated that change
by his own sensibility and the band's sensibility.
It seems like at a time when everything was psychedelic and all this stuff,
then The Band came out and they kind of brought everything back to earth.
I mean, Clapton wanted to be in The Band.
And George Harrison wanted to be in The Band.
Everybody wanted to be in The Band.
They became instant classics, and they were milestones in American music,
because it was a new standard.
We wanted it to be more than just a concert, we wanted it to be a celebration.
He said that The Band is gonna give its last performance
and they're gonna have all these guests.
Everyone from Van Morrison and Muddy Waters
to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, you know, Ronnie Hawkins.
I said, "Well, forget it." I said, "This has somehow gotta be recorded."
♪ The night they drove Old Dixie down ♪
♪ And all the people were singing, they went ♪
♪ Nah nah nah nah nah ♪
Listen to the lyrics of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
over and over again and still find something new.
It's still, when you hear their music, it's not of the past.
It's of the present.
My name is B. Mitchell Reid and I'm talking here with Jesse Ed Davis.
How'd you pick up a guitar?
Jimmy Reed and Elvis Presley came on.
That really did it for me.
I can't say enough about how valuable Jesse Davis was.
He had a special touch, special sound for the blues, which I love the way he played.
When I listen to his solo to this day I hear every note.
But with Jesse Ed you always felt like there was more in his back pocket.
You never felt like you got everything he had.
I particularly fell in love with Jesse Edwin Davis because he was with Taj Mahal,
and Taj's album is what spurred me to rock more.
That-that touched something inside of me.
So we're playing live at the Whisky a Go Go.
I usually played my harmonica with my eyes closed.
And I happened to open them up in the middle and looked down on the floor
and there's Mick Jagger dancing; there's Brian Jones dancing; there is Keith Richards dancing.
And it was just one of the best times.
It was just... it couldn't have been better.
And somewhere along the last part of November, eight tickets came to our manager's office.
First-class round trip tickets on BOAC to London.
And to be asked to the Rolling Stones.
The rest is history.
I don't think Taj was selling a lot of records at that point,
but then they went to England and did the Rock and Roll Circus.
And Jesse met John Lennon.
And they hit it off like long lost brothers.
And so of course John just fell in love with this guy.
When Jesse went over and they found out that he was Native,
they were so enthralled with that, they took to him right away.
I gotta commend him for being bold enough to come right out and being proud of his culture
and proud of his blood line.
Jesse had a bit of exotic about him too.
He was Native American, he was a cool dresser, and he played great, tight, dynamic blues.
And the British rock aristocracy, they loved this, you know.
This is something they can't get naturally.
They have to import it.
So that's why Jesse became such a go-to guy.
John Lennon loved Jesse Ed over the moon.
He thought he was one of the greatest guitar players he's ever heard.
That's how I got into the Bangladesh concert.
About two days before the concert, Eric Clapton came down really sick
and George called me up and said, "Look, will you play?"
And of course I said yes.
I just jumped at the chance.
This is Jesse Ed Davis.
Everybody wanted to use him at that point.
Here he is with the Beatles, Clapton, you know uh, the biggest,
most important musicians in the world, they all wanted him.
When I was making my first record I thought, you know, like I get Jesse Ed to play,
and I called him and he listened to the song I had in mind for him to play
and he said, "I don't really hear myself playing on this.
You got anything else?"
I said, "Yeah, well, okay, cue up that other song."
And uh, and that other song was the song that he wound up playing on Doctor my Eyes.
He played it once. He listened to it for a minute and he said,
"Okay, I can play this. This. I can play on this."
And he says, "Just cue it up and I..." he goes out and he's tuning his guitar.
I mean, I wound up just recording everything.
I said, "You better record everything." So he tunes up as he's getting to the solo
and he says, "OK, that's the solo? OK."
And he didn't do the whole length of it or anything like that, he's like, "OK."
And he played this solo once.
My record comes out and he's shocked to find out that it's a hit; it's like a top ten hit.
Like, he's all over the place; everybody's saying, "Who is that guitar player?"
And people still want to play that solo if they play that song.
♪ Doctor, my Eyes Cannot see the sky ♪
He was hanging out with some very important people, big rock 'n' roll people,
who were very into heroin. And they just did it.
- It was like, "Want to try some of this?" - "Sure."
The Jesse Ed that I knew before he left on the, uh, Rod Stewart and Faces tour
was not the Jesse that came home.
He came back from that tour a junkie, and he wasn't before.
He went and checked into yet another rehab for Indian people: the Eagle Lodge.
And by then I was done.
I'm, like, "Show me a year; I want to see that one year chip or don't bother coming home."
In 1985 I was speaking at Cal State Long Beach and Jesse was in a halfway house,
the Eagle Lodge Halfway House in Long Beach
and so that whole crew from that halfway house came to my speaking thing.
And then Jesse introduced himself and the first thing he did was he me his name
and the second thing he said to me was he could make music from my words.
See, and I had been looking for two years for somebody to do that.
♪ Grafitti Man's got something to say ♪
♪ Message in a scrawl ♪
♪ Message on the wall ♪
♪ Put on blinders! ♪
Grafitti Man with John Trudell; I thought this was so original
and there was something just beautiful about what they were doing together.
And Bob Dylan got a copy of it and he did this interview with Rolling Stone
and he said it was the best album of the year.
He's the one that got attention to us.
This is '85 when they did the first record and he was completely sober
the entire time he was doing it.
I know he was because I'm the Sobriety Sargent-at-Arms, and so is John.
When he showed up in my life, ex-drug-addict; he's fightin' a habit
and I'm an ex-kicked out militant political activist.
You know, there's no demographic for us. Fuck.
I mean in reality who's gonna take us on?
Because there's no demographic for that.
I'm real proud to be playing with John Trudell and I'm real proud to be an Indian.
And this is, uh, something I hope that doesn't go by you, what we're trying to do.
What Jesse did was he brought me music, he gave me a band;
he dressed me up as a rock 'n' roller.
He put me on stage, helped me learn how to be on stage, and then he checked out.
That's what Jesse did.
I mean that's the way I look at it.
Now here's a guy who can play guitar; can make you cry
and make you laugh and make you think.
Yet he was self-medicating himself to a degree; he must have been in so much pain
that he was taking so much medicine that it eventually killed him.
And they found him dead on the floor of the laundry room of his apartment building
in Culver City with a needle in his arm.
So the demons came back.
If he had been cleaned up, something got him back.
It broke my heart.
We thought our contribution was really very positive.
We walked the land, played the music that we loved.
And, uh, some of us lived to talk about it.
There's nobody who plays like him.
He's not gone; he is everywhere.
I can't put a radio on, I can't go to the market... anywhere-he's everywhere.
I want that music to continue to bring joy and blow people's minds always,
and it always will.
♪ Doctor, my eyes Cannot see the sky ♪
♪ Is this the prize For having learned how not to cry? ♪
That's why Pat and Lolly Vegas ask you, Do you want to dance?
♪ Do you wanna dance and hold my hand? ♪
♪ Tell me I'm your lovin' man ♪
♪ Oh baby, do you wanna dance? ♪
My grandfather had a guitar.
He set it above the armoire, you know, and he said,
"When you can reach that guitar you can have it."
And, uh-so I stood on a chair and took it.
♪ Do you wanna dance? ♪
I just got the bug, you know.
Once I got it, that was it; it was over.
That's all I wanted to do, you know.
My brother and I, we said we're either gonna go to New York or L.A.
to pursue the music, to pursue the dream, you know?
And, uh, we flipped a coin; it came out L.A.
Was it hard? Like, when you guys first came to Hollywood,
two guys from northern California; you know, dark skin.
I know it must have been hard for you to get jobs and shit so.
Yeah, 'cause they weren't hiring.
The Sunset Strip and Hollywood wasn't hiring anybody that was ethnic.
Like black or brown. You had to be strictly white.
Now? Another Gazzarri hotspot! Hollywood A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip!
These are the lucky ones; they got inside. Not everyone was so fortunate.
We went and played at Gazzarri's on the Strip. It used to be a block, two blocks
down the street waiting to get in every night, seven days a week.
Did they have all sorts of different bands rotating out?
No, just one band. Headlining Vegas.
♪ Oh, baby! Do you wanna dance? ♪
We were wearing really nice mohair suits with nice black shoes.
♪ Do you, do you, do you wanna dance? ♪
And we did our Cajun set and we wore bib overalls.
I had to keep changing so I had to do something that we could actually hold onto
and it would be ours.
Jimi was one of the people that supported us the most.
He's the one that told us in the very beginning, "Do the Indian thing, man."
To see them on Midnight Special doing Come And Get Your Love
in full regalia
doing the drum chants before they would go into one of their hit records...
That was actually-that was pretty heavy.
♪ ♪
We used to mic the floor, you know.
So when we came out, the stomping sounded like a herd of buffalo coming.
You know what I mean? It really sounded loud.
There we were, uh, four young Native Americans doing these chants, these primitive chants
and then all of a sudden going to this rock 'n' roll.
And then put the two together and the people would just say,
"Wow, what's going on? What's going on here?"
♪ Hell, hell, what's the matter with your head? ♪
They couldn't believe it.
Here they are, these four Indians, with you know, garb and moccasins
and all the things that they've seen in film actually playing rock, you know.
And our album came out and it just took off and it went crazy.
You know Come And Get Your Love, it's in Guardians of the Galaxy.
♪ Hell, hell what the matter with your head yeah ♪
When the hero is marching through the alien landscape knocking off monsters
and all this stuff, he's strutting to Redbone.
There's a real conqueror's vibe to that song.
It's a great track; it's a great song and they were a great band.
And they're great artists, you know.
Uh, it's not easy to come up with a really accessible, funky, heartfelt hit single;
that's not an easy thing to do and they did it.
♪ Come and get your love Come and get your love ♪
You can be explicitly political and make an important point,
but ultimately getting through is the best revenge.
You want to do it with class; you want to do it with dignity.
And Redbone did that.
They had the class; they had the dignity; they had the hooks.
And they got through.
So they win.
I come from, uh, East Los Angeles, California, living in the barrios.
I lived in the barrios. You did? Where?
I was in east L.A. on Geraghty.
Dude, I lived in Boyle Heights-Dogtown.
I was in Geraghty, dude.
Wow!
Yes, East L.A. Represent, Dude.
Bass line off of your song it mirrors, uh, the song we had, uh,
called Let's Get It Started that we did in 2003.
Yeah, I loved that.
Yeah, it's got that-it's got that haunting, like, walking, like,
♪ Domp, domp, domp, domp, domp, domp, domp, domp, domp, ♪ Ghost Spirit.
You got twenty-five thousand people in an audience
singing Let's Get It Started,
dancing to that bass line and people are going bananas.
The Black Eyed Peas sold sixty million records around the world.
I grew up understanding my Mexican roots more than my Native roots.
There has to be something that sparks you and some people will be, like,
"Well, it was my dad or my mom." But honestly for me it was my grandma.
When I went to my grandmother as I got older,
she would start breaking out the old old photo albums.
By bringing me into her culture, which was, uh, Shoshone,
it set me into understanding where I come from.
It started making sense to him.
Like, "Why do I feel this way? Why do I hear things this way? Why do I dance this way?
And can fit these rhythms in that are neither black nor white.
I started realizing how important and how beautiful
being Shoshone and being Mexican were.
When you hear something that you sparked off and inspired so many people
and you weren't aware of that and it just takes you by surprise-
Yeah. Yeah. It was inspiring.
You know, I-I want to do another one.
You know, I love that you and I come from the same background.
Our stories are similar and it's good to see positive brothers trying to inspire.
That just lifts me up; I'm off the ground right now, you know.
That's a beautiful thing for me.
Rock 'n' roll! Heavy metal! Party! Rock's bitchin!
I moved to L.A. in 1985.
The Sunset Strip back then was packed and crazy every night.
All the girls had like no clothes on; all the guys had crazy hair.
You'd be in front of the Roxy and you'd see Axl, Slash, Matt Sorum,
you'd see all these guys who were pretty much gonna be the future of rock 'n' roll,
I mean everybody was there.
I wanted to be a rock star; I didn't want to be like an "Indian rock star"
I wanted just to be a rock star.
I was homeless, I was broke, but I knew I was going to have to
come up with some kind of of identity if I was going to make it.
In L.A., I really didn't fit in because I wasn't black and I wasn't white.
So I was a rock guy but I really loved black music.
I was playing with George Clinton and Bootsy Collins
and everyone in town thought I was this super funk guitar player.
But the truth is they wouldn't even let me play any funk on their records at all;
they'd only let me play rock.
But I'd watch them and I'd learn, because those guys could play funk
like on a whole other level.
Then I'd get around my white friends and I'd play some funk
and then my funk would blow their funk away, right,
so to them they all thought I was this funk guy.
All of the sudden I'm at the Philadelphia Spectrum playing in front of
25, 000 people with Rod Stewart rupping a solo on the song Dynamite.
I mean this whole thing was madness to me. I mean, my last band was my high school band.
Stevie Salas: bad rock 'n' roller; rock star.
You got to have balls and that's what it takes for rock 'n' roll.
So I'm on a private jet; I'm making tons of money and I have all these women,
but pretty soon I don't know who I am anymore.
Randy Castillo, he befriended me knowing I was a Native American
and he met me right when I was finishing the Rod Stewart tour.
I was going deeper and deeper into alcohol and partying and which girl I could be with
and how much money I could make or house I could buy,
and he could tell I was losing my mind.
He said to me, "I'm going to take you to New Mexico".
I'm taking John Trudell with me up to Taos.
We want to get together and have a little bit of a talk about our departed friend Randy Castillo.
Mr. Randy Castillo!
Randy Castillo.
Randy Castillo from New Mexico.
He'd be like playing his drums. I remember he always did this thing
where he hit the kick drum: boom, boom, boom.
Mega-star.
Cover of every magazine.
Mr. Randy Castillo!
I was in Los Angeles and spent my time then going fucking nuts, right?
You know, just every actress I could see, every Playboy bunny I could get;
every cocktail I could drink.
Me and Randy started becoming friends and he says, "You're pretty fucked up."
He goes, "I need to take you to Indian country."
Right.
I didn't really ever have heard that phrase.
Indian country? He brought me here.
The secret to Indian country is when you're losing your mind
only lose the parts that need losing.
- Right it is. I'll tell you. - Right.
The last thing you wanted to be when you were my great-great-grandfather
was an Indian because only bad things were happening to Indians.
The Mexicans could chase the Apache into America without permission...
if they they were in pursuit of killing Apache.
The Americans could cross into Mexico without permission
if they were chasing Apache and killing Apache.
It depended where you were at in the land.
Some places they would rather be an Indian than a Mexican.
And in some places they'd rather be a Mexican than an Indian.
All right?
Uh, and in some places, they didn't want to be either but they were
so some of them would be calling themselves Hispanic.
Randy Castillo was confident and loved being an Indian, heads up loud and proud and representing,
He was just such a beautiful man and a great ambassador for the American Indians.
He was just such a great drummer, number one.
And he was an amazing showman.
Randy's roots, his Native American roots, his New Mexican roots, made him stand out.
He was like a spirit; that's what you sensed coming into the room.
You know, if you walked into a room and he was there
and even if you didn't see him, you knew he was there.
He was just out there and he was putting it out there and he was like a magnet.
I mean, he knew exactly who he was, exactly who he was gonna be.
We were really close.
When we had a day off we'd spend it together; we'd go to a nightclub.
He rapidly became one of my best friends.
Ozzy! Ozzy! Ozzy!
Here's a song dedicated to Mr. Randy Castillo, it's a number called Tattooed Dancer.
Well, Randy had become one of the most influential heavy metal drummers in the world,
uh, because of his work with Ozzy.
And Ozzy always said he loved working with indigenous people, Hispanic people.
It was like he had a connection with them 'cause he felt they had better rhythm.
And he always mentioned Randy as being a direct connection
to that indigenous energy and that rhythm that he loved.
Oh say... my brothers.
How are you, man?
Good to see you.
How are you?
It was always in Randy's blood because... being Apache you know,
but he took it to a different level and went higher,
became one of the best drummers in the world.
I know when he saw Benito's drums he wanted a whole trap set like that.
You know.
And too bad we didn't get to do that, you know, for him.
He had a style that was obviously influenced by his roots,
kind of Indian drumming thing that was going underneath it;
he didn't drum like a normal person.
Normal people would just-you know, they just play drums like this.
But there was this
it was just this pounding thing that was going through everything.
It was his heartbeat; Randy's playing the heartbeat and that's it.
It's it; it's Indian country right there.
Bam!
A lot of that funk, it's from the earth; it's organic, you know.
It's-it comes from the war dances and there's something tribal about it.
It's very primal.
And that I always equate to his roots.
You know he had, uh, a grandmother who was a curandero, a healer.
And he was very much in touch with that kind of spiritual thinking
and his indigenous ancestry.
He transcended all of the civil stuff that you see on a day-to-day level.
He sort of had this little jump over where he had a path
that went back to that and he was constantly tapping into that
and bringing that in through his music, through the way he played.
And one day we were going somewhere and I went to pick him up and he said,
"Hey, you know I found something over here; I've got this little thing over here."
and I go, "What's that?"
And he goes, "Well, it's like a little bump."
And I said, "Well, it's probably you're picking at your, you know,
whiskers all the time or whatever it is you're doing."
He goes, "No, it's underneath."
And I said, "Well, you know, I don't know; maybe you should get it checked out."
And he sort of neglected it for a while and... and one day he goes,
"Well, uh, I went to the doctor about that today."
Then he said, uh, "I'm just gonna go home."
And I go, "What's going on?"
And he goes, "Well, um-uh, that thing that I've got on my neck, it's cancer."
Just went from being this huge personality to just this waif
of a memory of something that once was.
I run into Hispanics, Native Americans today that come up to me
and ask me about Randy Castillo, you know.
He's a celebrated hero amongst that community.
Just keep on practicing like a maniac.
Practice. Practice.
And listen and try to play with other people as much as you possibly can
because you can learn a lot faster that way.
And, uh, the whole idea is to play with a band.
You know you can lock yourself up in your room and practice forever
but if you don't play with somebody then, uh, you're gonna sound that way.
So, uh, stick with it, you know and, uh, you'll do it if you want it bad enough.
♪ Stand up, stand up! ♪
When you're surrounded by beautiful people that come from the Nations,
and they're proud of their heritage; it just inspires everybody.
♪ We've been fightin' for our freedom since the Nina and the Pinta and the Santa Maria ♪
♪ Stand up! Like Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Leonard Peltier ♪
Indigenous people being left out of the story of music
of course has everything to do with the land.
It has to do with the way of imagining the American Dream,
which was a land cleared of indigenous people.
♪ Don't stand between the reservations and the corporate banks ♪
♪ They'll send in federal tanks It isn't nice but it's reality ♪
♪ Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee ♪
It's been a long time but we're still here; we're still alive and we're singing.
♪ Cover me with pretty lies ♪
♪ Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee ♪
They tried to erase it but it didn't get erased.
If they had erased it, we wouldn't be able to pick up the pieces.
♪ They got these energy companies who want the land ♪
♪ And they've got churches by the dozens ♪
Yeah, you wouldn't let me talk about it before; well, now I'm gonna talk real loud.
♪ Want to guide our hand and sing our mother earth over to pollution, war and greed ♪
♪ Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee ♪
The big racket's been around for a long time.
And anybody who really wants to be effective learns how not to fight it...
'cause they'll outgun you, but how to work around it, through it,
how to even heal it up.
We carry a medicine in us, you know, especially the medicine of the arts.
♪ Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee! ♪
Subtitles by explosiveskull