BLACKFOOT MUSIC

Since I’ve started a novel in which one of the main characters is a Blackfeet concert pianist who breaks his hand in a fistfight over his dad, so he can’t play the piano well enough to perform anymore. He reverts to “Indian music,” meaning singing and drumming. I needed a trope for “assimilation” and then the return to the early ways many younger (forties) Blackfeet have made. But what do I know about “Indian music?”

Praise Google, I raised a reference to “Blackfoot Musical Thought: Comparative Perspectives” by Bruno Nettl. (1989: Kent State University Press.) This has turned out to be quite a wonderful book, and not just because it was exactly what I needed. It is clear, graceful, and tactful while never sparing sharp analysis. Some of his informants were a bit like Moliere’s Bourgeosie Gentilhomme who was astounded to discover he had been speaking prose. That is, they had been singing the way they were singing because that’s the way one properly sings! What else? Nettl knows what else and can explain it without making one feel like a dummy. (Enough books for dummies in the world!)

The list of his informants was reassuring: Tom Many-Guns, Mary Ground, Calvin Boy, Darryl Blackman, John Tatsey, Percy Bullchild, Pete Stabs-by-mistake and Earl Old Person. These were established interlocuters in the Sixties and some were part of our Bundle-keeping circle. I knew all but Pete and Percy. Earl is the only one I know is alive.

Nettl’s gentle and persistent teasing out of ideas impressed me much. He says, “I ordinarily would not say, ‘Okay, let’s do the Medicine Pipe Songs.’ Rather, ‘Would you like to start, or are there some things you want me to know first?’” Of course, the music IS the culture, at least in part, so Nettl gives us as clear a brief version of the tribe’s history as I’ve seen. His explanation of the old Blackfoot/Blackfeet quandary, which is quite a little test, is both clarifying and humorous.

Nettl knows that cultural flow is dynamic, changing and yet persistent. There is something like the Johari psychological window at work, the four panes of the window being: Things I know about me and that everyone else knows, things I know about me that no one else knows, things I don’t know about myself but everyone else knows, and things neither I nor anyone else knows about me.

Among his intriguing lists and categories is a continuum of songs:
1. Specific powerful group ceremonial songs like the Bundles.
2. Religious with significant social components.
3. Religious narrative songs that accompany stories.
4. Ceremonial and partly religious songs about warfare and death like scalp dances or songs of mourning. (Today there is much use of “honor songs.”)
5. Secular songs with religious elements, like songs of age grade societies.
6. Social song dances, like Grass Dance.
7. Secular and recreational songs, like the one that goes with Stick Game.
8. Informally recreational songs, like lullabies.
9. Personal informal singing like “walking songs” or “riding songs.”

Bob Scriver said that the first time he heard the song that goes with the big circle of men on horseback bringing the branches to put over the framework of the Sun Lodge, he was only a child, but it was so thrilling that he never forgot it. He could sing it. He had formal music training as well as teaching music in high school and wrote music based on Blackfeet themes. I have no idea where they’ve gone. When we painted the Badger Lodge, he had gathered the proper animals according to his dream, but our informants said they didn’t know the right songs for all of them. Overnight, Bob said he “caught” the missing songs, so we could go ahead with the ceremony. I think he was quite sincere.

McClintock speaks of the night camps in the 1900’s and how one could hear sweethearts riding double or just individuals walking, quietly singing those “walking” and “riding” songs as they moved over the prairie near the lodges. Nettl says few were recorded, but I yearn to hear them.

Another of his lists is perceptions that were agreed upon by varying consensus. Everyone agreed that the basic unit was a “song,” but they also thought white people had too many words. Some people would claim “this is my song,” and others might agree that a person could own a song, but disagree about whether that specific person actually owned that song. Some of the informants were so respected that the others, even if they didn’t have that information, would say it must be right. Others thought it was all a big fuss over something dead, gone, buried and best left alone.

There was disagreement on the supernatural aspect of the songs, ranging from believing that a song was efficacious and potent in another world to feeling (maybe like whites) that it was interesting and tribal, so should be respected, but not more than that.

When it came to a specific song, some would say, “Oh, yes. These are the right notes and words.” Or they might say, “Well, it’s the right form.” Or they might agree on the song but not agree on what it meant.

Nettl feels that the Blackfeet culture is nouns, not verbs like the seductive Hopi idea. He says that he was told about things, units, often enumerated, often in fours. (I think of Jimmie Welch the Senior speaking of listening to the old warriors in front of Sherburne’s -- this would have been in the Twenties so those men were probably born about 1850 or earlier. He said they would say, “There were six of us on that war party.” Then they would name the ones not there and point out the ones who were also sitting on the bench. They were just talking to each other, counting over the old days.) But Nettl suggests they didn’t making heirarchies, saying one thing was better than another. It was characteristic to attach a song to an activity or event, but once in a while a song would belong to a person, or sometimes was handed down through a family.

This only scratches the surface and isn’t recent enough to account for the huge amount of NA flute music, or someone like Jack Gladstone who merges several traditions, or ‘49’s which are a synthesis of pow-wow and country music that has LOTS of words, but words relevant to reservation life. And he doesn’t speak of my favorite: Ken Scabby Robe’s Blacklodge Singers and their pow-wow songs for kids based on Saturday morning cartoons. “Is it a bird? NO! Is it a plane? NO! Omigosh, it’s MIGHTY MOUSE!!”

The falsetto, pulsing, in-the-head voices, almost always in unison with others, speak to my heart. Nettl gives three examples with music written out “white style.” In the context of the Iraqi war the words of the third are heart-breaking. It is sung to a sweetheart by a warrior leaving, “Woman, don’t worry about me. I’m coming back home. I’m going back home to eat berries.” Yes, sarvisberries, fresh off the bush or in a ceremonial soup. And nowadays the singer-warrior might be female.