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Written in Folk Roots issue 141, 1995

ROBBIE ROBERTSON & THE RED ROAD ENSEMBLE
Music for “The Native Americans”
Capitol 7243 8 28295 2 2 (1994)

It seems Bill Miller was right - since the film Dances with Wolves there appears to be a good deal of re-assessment of native Americans going on. For example, the six-hour TV documentary “The Native Americans”, whose music soundtrack gives us this album.
      Robbie Robertson, a Mohawk descendant via his mother, here brings together musicians from several nations, including Rita and her sister Priscilla Coolidge (Cherokee) to make modern native American roots music. “In the beginning I thought the record was going to be more traditional than it turned out ... what it became doesn’t have anything to do with what we’ve been fed in old westerns. Like any other music, Native American music has evolved”, he says, and I’ve no reason to doubt his sincerity.
      So I guess it’s just a symptom of the condition of much north American mass culture that most of this album melodically, rhythmically and texturally stays securely on the highway of AOR-acceptability, though probably those who think that’s the only road there is would see it as quite close to the hard shoulder. There are the sort of insistent and admittedly appealing rhythm patterns which, for example, the band Redbone used in the late 60s and which, though they may have traditional origins, now stray close to movie stereotype.
      It doesn’t really veer off in the direction of the much more exciting wilderness until towards the end, particularly with the lovely final track, Twisted Hair, by Choctaws Jim Wilson and Dave Carson, which features Lakota opera singer Bonnie Jo Hunt accompanied by a choir of pitch-transposed crickets.
      There’s another aspect, though; by working and being successful in the idioms of the mainstream an album like this can perhaps encourage Native Americans, as well as reaching a lot of other people. Let’s hope it doesn’t just lead the latter to expect that native American music, so radically different from mass culture that despite everything it has persisted to the present day and still has much to teach, must all be served up in similarly easily digestible form.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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