This next section starts out in my hometown, South County, Rhode Island, from whence hailed one of America’s first military war heroes Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, Hero of the War of 1812, and the Battle of Lake Erie. Fought the Barbary Pirates. Fit the French in the Quasi-war. Not the Crazy War, the Quasi-war! Look it up! “Oh, quipes! You queatures, with your cwazy war!” ...But we were talking of Commodore Perry. He’s the man who uttered the immortal words, “Don’t give up the ship”, a phrase later appropriated by Jerry Lewis. He also said, “We have met the enemy and he is ours,” which was later mangled by Pogo! Perry’s a distant relative of mine as are many of the folks in this long and winding shaggy dog story.
Well, it seems that Oliver Hazard Perry’s granddaughter married a guy named John La Farge who in his day was considered a very important painter. La Farge traveled around Asia gettin’ his education with Henry Adams, diplomat, descendent of two presidents and another distant relative of mine. And he studied painting in Newport with William Morris Hunt. Newport was founded by a number of my ancestors, who were religious heretics. In the tradition of Walt Whitman, this story about someone else…is gonna be all about me. And then it’ll bounce back and be all about you. And that’s probably the only way it’ll be about Walt Whitman.
Anyway, one of John’s grandsons was a man named Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge, another important forgotten guy. OHP La Farge was an anthropologist who specialized in the Native American peoples of the southwest, and he won the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for literature for his novel Laughing Boy, which is set among the Navaho. Have you read that one? Have you ever heard of that one? Laughing Boy? It’s all on this romance between young Laughing Boy and his heart’s desire, name of Slim Girl. They even made a movie out of it in 1934. Ramon Novarro was this Laughing Boy, Lupe Velez was Slim Girl. Both of these actors were Latin, not Navaho, by the way but this movie was made in Hollywood, where more often than not the creative rallying cry is “close enough”. Anyway, Laughing Boy and Slim Girl meet at a pow wow and fall for each other, but Slim Girl’s been corrupted by white men, and cavorts with ‘em, and takes gifts from them, and has a hard time buckling down to traditional Navaho life, not to mention monogamy, since she was raised in the city, which as you know, can lead to all manner of unhappiness. Anyway, that’s the spine of the thing. Now you don’t have to read the book.
Right after Oliver Lafarge won his Pulitzer, he received another prize in the shape of a son. Oliver Albee La Farge. Albee – that’s the same name as the head of the big time vaudeville circuits and his adopted grandson the playwright of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Both named Edward Albee. Oliver Albee Lafarge’s maternal grandmother was one of these Albees and yes it’s the same family although you have to go back to 1717 to get to their common ancestor.
Anyway, Oliver Albee La Farge would also make a mark in the show business. He grew up in New Mexico and Colorado. His parents split up when he was six. His dad married a Mexican senorita; his mom married a rancher and rodeo roper. When he was a teenager Oliver competed in rodeos himself, and started singing cowboy songs on the radio. He inherited his father’s interest in Native Americans, but then grew apart from his father and changed his name. The name Oliver must have cast a long shadow by that point so he placed his chips on the love of Pete. Pete La Farge participated in theatre plays and studied acting for a time. Served in the Navy in the Korean War.
Finally his rambles took him to New York City during the big folk music revival explosion and this is where he made his mark. He studied at the feet of Cisco Houston and Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White and fell in with the elite crowd of Greenwich Village folk revivalists like Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk and Rambling Jack Elliott. He recorded five albums of his own for Folkways records, mixing cowboy ballads, and African American blues numbers, and what came to be regarded as his specialty, original songs about the plight of the American Indian. At Pete Seeger’s 1962 Hootenanny at Carnegie Hall, Dylan performed La Farge’s song “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”, about America’s history of broken treaties with the first nations. Would have been a perfect song to revive at the Standing Rock protests and I’ll bet someone did.
In 1964 the Man in Black Johnny Cash included five of La Farge’s tunes on his concept album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, and this was the high water mark for La Farge. Pete thought he was part Narragansett, Johnny thought he was part Cherokee. and they bonded. Turns out both were 100% white but it seems to me that more good than harm came out of this relationship. But a third folk singer I want to mention IS part Native American, part Creek Indian from Georgia. His name is Patrick Sky, and this fact (that he’s Creek) is undoubtedly a factor in his recording a Pete La Farge song on his critically acclaimed 1965 debut album. Sky and his wife Cathy started the Post and Beam Coffee house in my hometown of South County, which is probably where I first heard the song. This song was also covered by Johnny Cash on Bitter Tears, and was also later recorded by the mutual friend of all three men, Bob Dylan. His version might be the best known one nowadays. But old Pete never got to hear it. In October of 1965 , at the top of his game, a new record contract under his arm, out of the blue, at the young age of 34, Pete LaFarge sailed off to the happy hunting grounds. It’s said that he OD’d on a drug called Thorazine, which he’d got addicted to from hanging out with Johnny Cash.
But now here’s that song, based on a true and
tragic story.
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