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Pete Seeger: 1919 – 2014 RIP

Tweet      If I had a hammer Where Have all the flowers gone? We Shall Overcome   Pete Seeger A fine soul passed today returning to the earth he loved and graced He hammered out freedom He hammered out justice no guns just roses this gentle gentleman embraced We are the better for his […]

Open Letter to President Obama – Inaugural debt of honour

Tweet    St Albans, England – January 7th 2013   Dear Mr President, I need your help to recognise a deep wrong which we both share: you as an American and President; me as the descendant of English and European race and culture. Recognise not remedy, because the wrong in question is beyond remediation; one […]

BUFFY SAINTE MARIE

Tweet    BUFFY SAINTE MARIE You shall be Earth He said Rain lover Corn giver home to the roots of trees and men Yes you shall be Earth I love the Earth she said My mother My brother Who sustains me My place, my home But I shall not be Earth You shall be Wind […]

Poem: Summer Snow – High in the Mountains where the glacial skier rides…

Tweet    http://www.riverstonegallery.com   (Inspired by the work of Buffy Sainte Marie)   Summer Snow   Born on the plains by the open restless sea the summer snow was calling me But the past was a place to visit and a hopeless place to be   I rode through the lowlands into the hills on […]

Honour – with this spirit blessed

TweetBuffy Sainte-Marie was an orphan, adopted out of her Cree tribe, raised in Maine where she was virtually the only Indian. Re-adopted by her tribe she re-connected with her ethnic roots. Training to be a teacher she wrote songs one of which was the iconic Universal Soldier now known in virtually every country of the […]

Idjagiedas – CD review, world music, Norway, Mari Boine

Tweet Idjagiedas (In The Hand Of The Night) – Mari Boine This music has ancient roots. It strikes a deep chord within us, which resonates. Mari Boine is Sami, from northern Norway. A place we used to call Lapland. “Norway? Music? Get outta here”! Bear with me. Mari Boine has almost single-handedly resurrected indigenous Sami […]

Running For The Drum – New CD from Buffy Sainte-Marie. Concert Reviews

Tweet(To buy: http://www.creative-native.com/) BBC Prize-winning Review New York: Clearwater Festival and Highline Ballroom – 17th/18th June 2007 Royal Albert Hall May 8th 1966.The place is packed – with that buzz that signals something special. The lights go down. The buzz stops. Expectancy now charges the darkness with energy. The spot slices the length of the […]

The New World – New? New to whom?

Tweet The New World – Terence Malik Critical response to this movie beggars belief. If he had just made the dullest movie ever (people walked out of my showing), Malik could be forgiven. But this empty, patronising, sentimentalised farrago of historic lies is scandalously ethnocentrically, totally white European. It perpetuates the worst form of a […]

If There Is No Eden – Afghanistan, Iraq and other madness

Tweet For those without religious belief who gave their lives and those who mourn them. If There Is No Eden If there is no Eden no paradise to be where shall rest the solace that sets our grieving free No hymns of praise console us still less serried bands the pomp and circumstance of mourning […]

Never Gone – Poem: for indians places are sacred – not time

TweetNative American – Indian – spiritual beliefs unlike say the Abrahamic religions, are spatial not temporal; communitarian not individualistic. This does not try to be an ‘Indian’ poem – that would be silly. But it does try to express a deep empathy towards the spirit of these ideas and the culture that struggles in the […]