Songs of the American Indian Movement

 

If you know the song of which I’ll speak, you probably know it as "Cherokee People", although the full title was “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)”. It was a #1 hit for the Raiders in 1971. The Raiders had earlier been known under the flashier name of Paul Revere and the Raiders. They were a successful garage rock combo famous for their gimmick of dressing like Revolutionary War soldiers, complete with tri-corner hats… and lest you chortle at the hokum you’d better know that they had a string of 23 consecutive hits in the mid to late ‘60s. I was about six years old when “Indian Reservation” came out and just the kind of brooding, melancholy child to love it. Like many with roots in the American Southeast our family was reputed to possess Cherokee blood and I later found a couple of great-great-great-great-great grandmothers in my family tree to confirm it, though you should know that that’s 2 out of 128 ancestors in that generation, which amounts to, I dunno, one Cherokee eyebrow, or one Cherokee nostril, in my make-up, something like that. But I certainly learned about the Trail of Tears long before it was taught to me in school, and with the proper tone of shame, sorrow, and regret. and at the knee of a paleolithically conservative father, I might add. We seem to make a brand new kind of conservative nowadays, ones with a psychopathic ethic of never apologizing for anything.

Something was in the air at that time of which I speak. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, the birth of modern Feminism, Stonewall, and much else, The American Indian Movement, or AIM had been founded in 1968. That same year President Johnson signed the Indian Rights Act, which allowed Native Americans full access to the U.S. Bill of Rights for the first time. The movie Little Big Man, which cast Dustin Hoffman as a white man raised by Cheyenne, was released in 1970. Dee Brown’s seminal book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which our family owned, came out the same year as the Raiders’ tune, as did that much ridiculed “Keep American Beautiful” TV ad with the Crying Indian. 1970 was the first National day of Mourning, established to protest the very idea of Thanksgiving. The Crying Indian was Iron Eyes Cody, who was really an Italian American actor named Espera Oscar de Corti. And throughout these years believe it or not, President Richard Nixon championed tribal self-rule, signing 52 pieces of legislation granting Native American tribes greater self-determination, which is one of the several reasons that, in spite of his many character flaws and out-and-out crimes against humanity, Nixon has never been dead last in most historian’s rankings of U.S. Presidents. He took his job very seriously, one might call it a grim determination, which is undoubtedly why he seemed to have the defiant, self-righteous delusion that no one else could do it.

So Native Americans were having a cultural moment in the early ‘70s. It probably seemed like things would finally improve for them. But alas it was not so. The years that followed saw the Wounded Knee stand-off of 1973, the Pine Ridge shoot-out of 1975, all the way up to the Standing Rock protests, and the scandalous unsolved disappearances of hundreds of Native American women of recent years. The needs of the indigenous people of this nation go, as ever, continually unaddressed. The consciousness that leads to progress seems to come in fits and starts, usually in the wake of tragedies that bring things to a boil. More often than not, even that is not enough. We’re a nation of consumers, and while we’re delighted to consume things like movies and pop songs and fashions and fads, we are rarely exercised to take risks or ACT.  Yet songs and all art can help raise consciousness, something we should never dismiss out of hand.

And thus we come to Nashville songwriter John D. Loudermilk, or Johnny Dee, as he was billed on his own recordings. Loudermilk penned such once-popular tunes as “Ebony Eyes”, “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye”, and “Tobacco Road”. He was a native of Durham North Carolina, and possibly part Cherokee although he was so fond of yarns it’s hard to know for sure. Loudermilk once told American Top 40 DJ Casey Kasem that he wrote his song to pacify a bunch of Cherokee who'd pulled him out of the backseat of his car during a stopover on a long drive and threatened to kill him. It turns out that the unflattering story was just cooked up to make  a fool of Kasem in revenge for waking up Loudermilk with a phone call at 3 in the morning. Lowdermilk did claim that his ancestors Homer and Martha Loudermilk were among those marked westward on the so-called Trail of Tears but that one’s never been verified either. and let’s be honest – Homer and Martha? But I would be glad to be proved wrong.

What we do know is that in 1959 Lowdermilk wrote this song which was originally recorded by singer Marvin Rainwater who was one quarter Cherokee and known for performing onstage in Native American themed outfits. The song as originally recorded went under the title “The Pale Faced Indian.”

Fans of the song will note several differences between Rainwater’s version and the Raiders’ better known hit, although you will admit it has as much hokum. Some of the lines in the verses were later cut, and this original version contains faux native chanting rather than the familiar melodramatic chorus with the lines “Cherokee People, Cherokee Tribe, So Proud to Live, So Proud to Die”. These changes were mainly made in 1968 by English singer Don Fardon who had the first hit single with the song, which was then eclipsed by the Raiders much bigger hit three years later.

And as I say, I loved the song. I had the single, which I’d picked up at a yard sale, and played it endlessly. It stirred my imagination. I connected to that family lore about Cherokee connections in my own family. When I was in the third grade, circa 1973, I made friends with a kid in my class who was the grandson of the Chief of the local Narragansetts. One time, with great solemnity, we and another friend held a blood brother ceremony, and I, in all earnestness, took on the name of “Running Buffalo”, a Plains Indian image that had little to do with either the Narragansett or the Cherokee, but sounded real cool. But there is another memory I have about that boy. He was spirited, and very funny, and he couldn’t sit still. The teacher was an old school disciplinarian who insisted on total silence, upright posture, and all manner of outmoded behavioral protocols (not unlike the ones imposed by my father, come to think of it). Anyway, she had her hands full with this shaggy haired rapscallion who wasn’t having any of it. He spoke and moved when he pleased, and was surly with her to boot. It was joyous to watch, especially among the majority of us who regarded the woman with terror. One day, she’d had enough of the kid's lip, blew her stack – and taped his mouth shut. Oh, she had cause to regret the day she did that, I can assure you.