Courtesy of Sherry Wray - Doug Wray (left), Vernon Wray (center) and Link Wray in his Army uniform (right).

But the Wrays, Vernon, Link and Doug, were no 1950s-era gang members. They were three brothers who were journeymen musicians by the time they reached their early 20s. As babies, they learned to sing along with their Shawnee Indian mother while she picked cotton and they picked up the guitar one afternoon from a worker in a traveling carnival who spied the three boys in a North Carolina yard trying to play the instrument.

In the mid-1940s the brothers played country and western before slipping into a 1950s-Perry Como-styled pop. Then Link Wray cut loose on a demo, a recording that was headed for the wastebasket when a record executive’s daughter chanced to play it. The song “Rumble” that she deemed to be right out of “West Side Story” has captivated generations of rock stars, movie directors and music lovers. Its signature power chord is credited as a progenitor of classic rock, punk and heavy metal.

Link Wray and his Ray Men were featured in the 2010 exhibition “Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Pop Culture” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Recently, Sherry Wray, Link’s niece and the manager of the family music business that Link’s older brother, Vernon, started in the 1950s, talked with American Indian News Service editor Kara Briggs.

Courtesy of Sherry Wray - Doug Wray, movie actor Wild Bill Elliott, Link Wray and Vernon Wray in the 1950s.

The story of Link Wray and his brothers is like a movie, or a song with three parts. Sherry Wray said that the brothers were close, working together in the studio and on stage even as Link Wray rose as a headliner. Vernon Wray worked to make music the family business as early as the 1940s when he first formed an orchestra and later a band featuring Link Wray on guitar. The family music company has held the licenses to the music of Link Wray and his Ray Men, which has allowed the family to direct its use, primarily in major motion pictures in the last 20 years.

Many rock superstars credit Link Wray and his distorted guitar with inspiring them, including Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Neil Young, the Kinks, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix. Sherry Wray is most excited about a new generation of Native American artists, including 36-year-old Mohawk rock musician Derek Miller, who reminds her of her uncle Link as a young man. Sherry Wray met Miller at the opening of “Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture.”

During an outdoor concert last summer at the museum, Miller told the audience, “Without Doug, “Rumble” would not have happened. It’s his stroll beat that sparked the whole thing. The Wray brothers shaped the voice of America!”

Briggs: For the last 30 years you have run the music company that holds the licenses to Link Wray’s hits. It’s the business your dad, Vernon Wray, started with his brothers, Link and Doug, in the 1950s.

Wray: Several people have said, “Do you know you are probably one of six to 10 independent private publishing companies in the world?” I do now.

Briggs: Your family, who would become Link Wray and his Ray Men, started out as kids playing music together.

Wray: My father, Vernon Wray, was the first of the three to get a record deal. Through that deal and the ensuing session, is how my uncle, Link Wray got to do the demo that became “Rumble.” My father’s youngest brother, Doug Wray, was the drummer. You don’t realize what a wonderful drummer Doug Wray had to be to keep time with Link Wray’s guitar rhythm. They started playing together as kids. There are a lot of families who were in business together, but I can’t think of a single one who is as close as mine was. It was like having three fathers. They were in the studio every spare minute, and they toured together all the time.

Briggs: Where did the Wray family come from? And I’ve read in interviews that Link Wray gave before his death in 2005 that part of the answer is poverty, they came from poverty. Link told one reporter, “We weren’t dirt poor like a white family. We were Shawnee dirt poor.”

Courtesy of Sherry Wray - Link Wray, his brothers and another musician shortly before they recorded the 1971 self titled album, “Link Wray.”

Wray: Dunn, N.C., was where my grandfather was born, and my grandfather didn’t move the family to Portsmouth, Va., until 1942. They were absolutely dirt poor. He was mustard-gassed in World War I, [and] when he got out of the Army they had to do share-cropping. My grandmother was Shawnee. She was crippled at 11. There were kids who teased her. The nutrition wasn’t as good as it became later. When one of the girls put her knee in Lilly’s back, it broke her back. The Indians were the ones who built a brace out of buckskin and bone for her, so when she stood her body could be supported. She kept all her body functions and her spine wasn’t injured. She had three children. All three [babies] weighed over 10 pounds. I don’t know how she did it. She would take the children on a picnic blanket and sing to them all day long while she picked cotton, to keep their focus on her, and as they got older they sang with her. They were church-going—everyone was in those days—so they sang in church.

Briggs: Music was simply part of their lives, and maybe in that time between the world wars, it was a part of country life. Entertainment was singing in family, or if you were really gifted, obtaining and playing an instrument. You were saying there was a special story about when Link got his first guitar.

Wray: Link got a hold of a guitar. I don’t know how he did, but he did. There was this black man, the only name I ever had was Hambone, and he saw the boys trying to play the guitar. So he came over and showed Link how to play a few chords and how to tune his guitar. He showed Link how to use the bottle-neck slide. He taught him for one afternoon, total. My mother is 83 and still alive. Once I asked her, “Why do you think they made it?” She said “Because they were so determined.”

Briggs: By World War II, the family moved to Portsmouth, Va., where your grandfather got work in the war industries. The bigger town gave your dad and uncles the chance to move up into the ranks of professional musicians.

Wray: As soon as my dad was old enough, he started running around and playing in any group that would let him. In those days, there was a club or some venue on every corner where you could go and hear live music and dance, and surprisingly that didn’t go away until the 1970s. So he got work in the Starlight Room. My dad, Vernon, founded an orchestra, and he played drums. It was the Vernon Wray Orchestra. He also started the first taxi-cab franchise in Portsmouth, and later Link would drive the cab for his brother. Vernon waxed bowling alleys for 2 cents a lane. When Link hit 16, well, people who were underage couldn’t go into bars and drink, but they could go in and play in bars. My father left the orchestra and they put together a band with Link on guitar, Vernon moved to the rhythm guitar, and Doug played the drums.

Briggs:  Rock and roll is what Link Wray and his Ray Men are known to play. But this was 1946; it was way before the birth of rock and roll. Link Wray was the kid brother to Vernon, who was the front man. Vernon, your dad, sang and led the band, which consisted mostly by now of Link and Doug.

Wray:   They also hired Shorty Horton, who was the bass player on all the Link Wray early hits.  Back then, unless you were playing big band or country you weren’t playing. They went to work playing country and western music. They had all the western regalia.  They were playing all the local venues and getting plenty of work. As the 1950s approached there was a place [Fernwood Farms near South Norfolk] in Virginia owned by Norman, Willie and Earl Phelps [the group the Virginia Rounders]. It was a combination of a stable, and there was a dance hall. They held dances there every weekend. Virginia had a lot of blue laws so people would show up with their “hard drinks” in paper bags and the dance hall would have ice and soft drinks as mixers. We kept our horses there, and my dad struck up a friendship with the Phelps’ and they started to play there, billing themselves as Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Hands. There was another guy, Sheriff Tex Davis, and when they played at his place, The Lazy Pine Ranch, they were Lucky Wray and the Lazy Pine Wranglers. Link was always extremely innovative. He kept experimenting around. By the early 1950s he was giving the music a little more of an edge. What Link said was when he saw how the kids reacted he immediately started playing around with things. They were able to set up a portable four-trac and begin recording in the kitchen at home.

Briggs: The Wray brothers started sending out demos. The record labels weren’t all very good. One they used never distributed their records and made them pay for the privilege of having the records pressed.  This is a story that could only be told in the post-war era, when national affluence and large, young populations of consumers contributed to a booming recording industry.

Wray: The Wray brothers were trying to play things more popish, like Patti Page and the Chordettes. The record industry recognized only country music and that whole generic pop thing. They came to D.C. My dad hired an agent. Link and Doug were in the hospital in 1956 with TB.  Dad’s agent was in one club and my dad was singing at another club. In those days they sent out talent scouts. The scout came into the club and sat down on the bar stool next to Dad’s agent who told him, you have to go hear Vernon Wray. Vernon signed with Cameo Records in Philadelphia, which had also signed Andy Williams and Pat Boone.  Vernon asked if he could have his brothers play with him. Link got a medical pass to get out of the hospital to go play on the session. They were so impressed with Link that they decided they decided to get Archie Bleyer of Cadence to hear Link. Archie Bleyer came down to Fredericksburg, Virginia to listen to Link and stayed the whole evening at a record hop. But he hated the studio version of Rumble until his daughter heard it and said it reminded her of “West Side Story.” They release it as “Oddball.”

Briggs: “Rumble” is released in 1958. Link was 28 years old, and Vernon 33, but the record company’s promotional department made them younger. “Rumble” was the game changer that among other things brought Link to the front of the band.

Wray: I rely on what my dad said. He was an amazing historian. He said it got airplay, but not in every city. In Boston the DJ took it off the record player and broke it and said “It will never get played on this station again.” But the next week it did because it was climbing the Billboard chart. Gang activity was a big deal, people were afraid, but that wasn’t what they [the Wrays] were doing. They were just trying to be innovative with their sound.

Briggs: Other things were changing in music that would change the dynamics of this literal band of brothers.

Wray: No one got filthy rich back then, even though the money was nice, the touring was nice. They still played the club circuit around D.C. They all performed and all sang. The record companies were working with all of them. The record company reversed my dad’s name from Vernon Wray to Ray Vernon. My dad’s record career was still going. But he understood supply and demand. There was Perry Como, Pat Boone, Andy Williams and Bing Crosby. There were so many guys singing in the pop venue. He moved into a businessman position, and let his contract go and opened a recording studio. After “Rumble,” they would release Link Wray and the Ray Men’s “Rawhide” in 1959 and “Jack the Ripper” in [1961].

Briggs: Link Wray’s sound was one part his innovative guitar playing, but it was also the recording, and the backup, notably by your uncle Doug on the drums for all of the hits.

Wray: There was a ton of musical talent that came shooting out in the late 1950s, but the engineering from those big studios was you get what you get. My father was a genius as a recording engineer. All you have to do is listen to anything Link Wray and then listen to the recording by the other early rock instrumentalists. When you listen to Link Wray music there is a top, middle and bottom. My dad did all manner of things to get the kind of sound out of things that he wanted. I can remember the first time I saw him pull the front off a bass drum and stuff it full of blankets. I am almost positive Link invented the power chord because I can remember all the experimenting they did.

Briggs: Rock music is full of outsized egos. A lot of family bands eventually split because of all kinds of differences. But the Wray brothers never did.

Wray: They fought more about the creative process; they didn’t fight about not liking and loving each other. They would argue over “I want to do it this way,” and then they would do it.

Briggs:  So what happened as music changed in the 1960s?

Wray: In the early 1960s their releases did great regionally, and they were touring like mad, doing television, and playing the college circuit. But when the Beatles came, it got tough. They kept playing and working together. In 1969 they did an album, “Yesterday-Today.” They did old hits on one side, and new songs like “Genocide.” “Genocide’s” very ominous sounding, and would later be used in this year’s Ray Liotta movie called “Street Kings of Motor City.”

Briggs: The whole folk-rock genre took hold in 1970. But there was still a fan base for Link Wray, and his Ray Men had by now established a fan base internationally.

Wray: There was a small house in back of our house, as a joke my dad spray-painted on it, “Wray’s Shack, 3 Tracks” and moved the studio into it. In 1971 Polydor issued “Link Wray,” recorded at the Shack and engineered by my Dad; and re-established him as a viable musician, and brought the Wray family back again into the popular music scene.  On the album cover was Link’s profile, wearing an Indian headband. “Fire and Brimstone” was a hit and was later covered by the Neville Brothers on their album “Yellow Moon.” “Fallin’ Rain” was another hit that the Neville Brothers covered later. Rolling Stone did a big spread on the family. At the time they played the Troubadour with Kris Kristofferson, and that was a love fest. That was when the Wray family moved back into the public eye. Link Wray had been so distinctive for so many years, and people must have thought my, gosh, there’s a whole family.

Briggs: Link Wray is credited with inventing the power chord and the Ray Men are known for not only playing, but expertly recording this music. It was a lot rockabilly, but it was also on the leading edge of the classic generation of rock and roll. So Link Wray and the Ray Men are in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, and many people think Link Wray should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Wray: The story is how [a young] Bob Dylan took some of his last money to see a Link Wray concert in Minnesota. When Link died in 2005, Jimmy McDonough, who did the biography of Neil Young, called me for information. I’d been hearing that Neil Young said, if I could go back in time I would want to see Link Wray and the Ray Men perform. Jimmy said that was true. When what he played affected people like Pete Townshend, who said he used to sit with his ear to the speakers trying to pick out Link’s chord progressions and Jimmy Page, and they acknowledge that they were inspired by Link, then maybe he ought to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Briggs: Vernon Wray died in 1979, and Doug Wray in 1984. The business that your dad built remains one of a handful of independent music companies left in the world. Owning the rights to all the music of Link Wray and his Ray Men has allowed you to control the music and allow it to only be brought out for prime opportunities.

Wray:  After my dad died, I did a lot of work for many years making sure the rights were what they should be. In the beginning all the interest I would get was reissues, but in 1983, I got my first call for a movie, “Breathless,” that starred Richard Gere, and they used “Jack the Ripper” in the pinnacle scene. In 1993 I was sitting in my living room, and a woman called and said she was putting together music for a Quentin Tarantino movie, “Pulp Fiction,” and they wanted “Rumble” and “Ace of Spades.”  The 1994 TV movie, “Roadracers,” starring David Arquette as a rebellious guy and Salma Hayek, was next. She was just a kid. There are so many references to Link Wray, at one point there is one of Link’s albums taped to the door of his apartment. She asks, “Who do you like?” And he said, “Link Wray’s cool.” She said, “Is he famous?” And he said, “No, that’s why he’s cool.”

Briggs: In the 1996 blockbuster “Independence Day,” Link Wray’s song is the only music other than the score.

Wray: When 20^th Century called, the man said “We spent so much money on the effects that we had to compose our own music, but we have a scene where “Rumble” would fit.” It’s in the bar scene where the men are taunting Randy Quaid’s character about being abducted by aliens, when the ground starts to shake, that’s when you hear “Rumble.”

Briggs: The movies have once again brought Link Wray and his Ray Men to international attention.

Wray: It has been a wonderful experience. It helped me feel worthy of continuing the work my dad and his brothers did. Link Wray got to tour more and have his music introduced to a whole new generation because of these movies.  He appeared on Conan O’Brien and was featured on the MTV Guitar Greats Special. He toured heavily in Europe and a couple times in the U.S. until he died in 2005.

What I am left with is our family history, father to son, father to son, and in my case, father to daughter; and what my dad said, “Family is sacred, sacred, and sacred.”

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American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Canyon Records - R. Carlos Nakai

Nakai, who is Diné and 64-years-old, released his first album, “Changes” on Canyon Records in 1983. His second album “Cycles” was used by American choreographer Martha Graham for her “Night Chant.” He has released more than 35 albums, bringing the timeless traditions and tonalities of the Native American cedar flute in the 21^st century.

He has collaborated with seemingly everyone from composer Philip Glass to two-time Grammy-winning arranger/producer Billy Williams to Hawaiian slack-key guitar virtuoso Keola Beamer to Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David. Last summer during the Santa Fe Indian Market, Nakai premiered “À Bec Quintet” a classical composition for flute, the Native American flute, clarinet, bassoon and bass clarinet that Nakai commissioned from Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate.

It was Nakai’s deep intellect and provocative perspective on where Native American music, including the flute, is headed in concert halls, jazz and classical venues, and beyond that caused American Indian News Service Editor Kara Briggs to ask him for an interview. In 2008, Nakai sat down at his computer to write and e-mail answers to her questions.

Briggs: Is classical music relevant for Native Americans, and how do you see it evolving as more Native artists and composers engage in it?

Nakai: The ambiguous, non-specific Eurocentric term “classical” refers to music that conforms to certain established standards of form, complexity and musical literacy as exemplified in the Western European discipline of theory and practice. Since the 1700s, the dissolution and dislocation of traditional tribal communities by colonial expansionism and federal policies enforced the disruption and loss of many forms of traditionally accepted material culture, social integration, rites-of-passage and the continuance of the long shadow of our mythic histories, traditions, and philosophies. Through the “reservation and boarding school period,” the mid-1970s emergent social programs, (Native Americans) sought to revitalize the traditions of indigenous American Indian culture.  Consequently, the “classical native” movement is a first attempt by Native Americans to revitalize what remains of the old culture and to distinguish the extant cultural voice of ancestral traditions and the influences of contemporary music within the purview of a Native composer.

Briggs: How do you experience the Native voice or Native tradition in classical music?

Nakai: The inclusive ingenuity of a composer or arranger who applies the usual practices of theory and practice while acknowledging the traditional context of ceremonial, social, spiritual or personal tribal vocal music expression is in keeping with present-day literacy of living in a contemporary multicultural world. The influence of societal change agents will enlarge upon and encourage opportunities in expression of newly inspired and contemporary innovations by Native musicians to speak with their own voice in all ventures of contemporary music.

Briggs: You’ve performed in symphonies, which makes me wonder how do you as a performer playing a traditional instrument bridge with a symphony, and all its European musical traditions?

Nakai: Simply in performing pieces composed for the Native American flute that successfully melds an understanding of disparate music traditions, while accommodating the technical and physical demands and limitations of both.

Briggs: Are we seeing an expansion of the definition of what is Native American music now, notably with Native musicians who are engaged in classical music?

Nakai: Yes, active positive participation by Natives engaged in “classical” music, be it derived from one’s own extensive historical traditional resources, or that obtained by study and experience within the modus of the European discipline of theory and practice, is inevitable in the future-oriented mobility of any culture and its traditions. In an ever-changing world with the influence of others through comparative and exemplary intercultural communication, philosophies and education, a Native composer will learn to integrate him or herself into the world as it exists and to use the varied mélange of influences to aspire and build their own singular life experience into the future, notably in the language of music.

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American Indian News Service

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By Linda Martin of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian - Guitarist and singer Derek Miller, who is Mohawk, performs on Canada Day, July 1, at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. He also performed last month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as part of the 5th annual Indian Summer Showcase.

At 35, and soon to release his third album, “Derek Miller with Double Trouble,” Miller’s rock roots trace back to a fellow Native guitarist—Link Wray, the Rockabilly Hall of Famer credited with inventing the power chord central to rock, heavy metal, pop and blues music. The Shawnee musician’s distorted electric guitar keyed hits like 1958’s “Rumble.”

For Miller, who once felt like a misfit kid playing roots rock in the era of rap, Wray became “my beacon of light.”

“I found a kinship with Link Wray,” Miller says. “There was so much intensity, passion and furiousness.”

Miller used to say his singing voice was made of “lots of whiskey and cigarettes.” Since completing rehab three years ago for alcoholism and drug addiction, Miller now says the music he makes with his voice and guitar emerges from the experience of growing up Mohawk on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, and later making his way in Toronto’s thriving aboriginal music scene.

“I have never backed away from being a Native artist, but for me it is now about crashing through this glass ceiling of being a Native artist,” he said.

Miller started performing at age 13. In the late 1990s, he toured with Buffy Sainte-Marie. In 1999, he co-produced Keith Secola and the Wild Band of Indians’ “Fingermonkey.” Two years later, Miller released “Music is the Medicine,” which earned the Juno Award for Aboriginal Recording of the Year. With a pause for rehab and recovery, which Miller notes in his iTunes bio, in 2007 he released the album, “The Dirty Looks.” On it, Miller uses “compressed, modern sounds on otherwise standard blues songs like “Devil Come Down Sunday,” said Chris Turner, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Last month, Miller performed at the museum, covering songs made popular by some of the Native artists represented in the current exhibition, “Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture.” These included Peter La Farge’s “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which Miller made his own.

“Derek always reminded me of Jimi Hendrix, a Mohawk Jimi Hendrix,” Turner said. “But take a song like “End of the World,” where he fools you, laying down a nice, subdued setting—almost sacred. Then out of nowhere comes this little wah-wah guitar warning before he punches you in the gut with a Link-style power chord.”

The new album’s first single, “Damned if You Do,” is a duet with Willie Nelson, who had not heard of Miller before. But while recording at Nelson’s Pedernales Recording Studio near Austin, Texas, Miller and the band talked a gardener into slipping Miller’s disc to the singer. After a listen, Nelson agreed to record the duet.

The song could be either man’s personal tale of drinking whiskey all night and wondering if morning will come. The new project somewhat inadvertently turned out to be a concept album, Miller says, telling the story of a man falling in love with a woman, and the terrible violence in the wake of love falling apart.

“At the end of the story you think the man is going to make a choice of killing her and her lover,” Miller said. “It’s dark, with songs leading up to that, and you don’t know whether it’s murder-suicide or just murder in the end.”

To Miller, “it’s Americana, or it’s Native Americana, really.”

For his new album, Miller is sporting his black hair cut short and slicked back, like his hero Wray in the 1950s. Miller never met Wray, who died in 2005 at 76. But he talks about starring in a Wray biopic.

Whether a movie ever gets produced, Miller is the latest in a long line of musicians to take inspiration from Wray. Like The Kinks, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young—many of whom are lobbying for Wray to be put in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—Miller aims to ride his inspiration to the sky.

“When I think of Link Wray, I am an eagle and I let the wind blow me where it may,” Miller says. “That is the freedom that encompasses Native America.  It encompasses what America was trying to do when it borrowed our constitution, our freedom of creativity. It is the freedom of inspiration to let your mind travel like an eagle.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Photo by Michelle Watt Sharel Cassity plays the alto saxophone in front of a mural of jazz greats. The Cherokee musician recently performed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“I believe that jazz comes from the powwow drum,” said Cassity, who lives in New York. “There are elements from Africa. The harmonic consistency comes from Europe. But you don’t get that thump, that boom, boom, boom in the bass and drums without the powwow.”

Jade Synstelien, the first bandleader to hire Cassity, says she brings a Native sensibility to all her work, including her new CD, “Relentless.”

Cassity performed with the Tony Lujan Septet at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian last spring. The concert introduced Cassity to bebop pioneer Oscar Pettiford, who was Choctaw and Cherokee. The concert also paid tribute to Pettiford’s friend Dizzy Gillespie.

Pettiford, who led a New York band with Gillespie as bebop was emerging in 1943, redefined the importance of the bass to jazz. He told the magazine Jazz Times that jazz was attempting to render American Indian rhythm.

Cassity’s family is musical on her Cherokee father’s side. Her father is a music therapist, her grandfather a harmonica player and her aunt a concert pianist. She recalls being “surrounded by music” during the time she spent with her father. “But I lived with my mom, who worked at a federal prison,” said Cassity, who spent much of her adolescence in the Oklahoma City area. “I would close myself in my room and practice all the time.”

Those long hours won her scholarships, ultimately to the Juilliard Institute of Jazz Studies, where she earned a master’s degree. Synstelien remembers meeting Cassity nine years ago at Smalls Jazz Club in New York City.

“She would be in the very back room by herself, practicing long notes, long tones on the saxophone, while she was putting herself through music school,” Synstelien said. “She has a work ethic greater than any musician I have ever met and she is growing into a better musician moment by moment.”

Synstelien recruited her to play in his Fat Cats Big Band. Since then, Cassity has become a member of a handful of bands of regional and national repute. Two years ago, Sherrie Maricle asked Cassity to join the Diva Jazz Orchestra, and last year the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band also added her to its lineup.

Maricle’s website describes Cassity as being able to draw “upon the polish and discipline of her conservatory training to augment what Jazziz Magazine called her ‘beautiful, highly-personal tone… this altoist’s flights are positively Bird-like.’”

As a student and later a professional musician in New York’s jazz scene, Cassity is often the only American Indian in the room. Yet she longs for the connectedness she recently felt when she met a Navajo trombone player, or learned about Pettiford’s Choctaw and Cherokee roots.

Synstelien says Cassity brings her own uniqueness to the international language of jazz, but also her talent, which allows her to play with the big cats. She can play “the fat sound of Cannonball Adderley,” he said. “She can play any style of jazz.”

“All the things people love from all time, from different jazz records,” Synstelien said. “She can do it right, with all the required soul and passion.”

Visit Cassity’s website at www.sharelcassity.com.

Hear Cassity lead her own band on alto saxophone at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9zehYBITc&feature=related.

Hear Cassity on soprano saxophone with the Diva Jazz Orchestra at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mtq7ytBrcc.

Listen to Pettiford at www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Ji8VAceLk&feature=related.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of Kim Cournoyer North Dakota’s Standing Rock High School Band performs on the back of a flatbed truck.

An urban Indian, Cournoyer was raised in the Chicago suburbs, far from the rural reservation of her forbears, which straddles the border of North and South Dakota. But the University of South Dakota-trained clarinetist had a dream of starting an all-Indian high school band.

“I believe the students need to embrace their culture, kind of like I did,” said Cournoyer, 45, who is Standing Rock Sioux, like most of her students.

American Indian marching bands emerged in the boarding-school era, when students were trained in European musical instruments and patriotic marches. From the 1930s through the 1950s, dozens of Indian nations had their own marching bands made up of musicians trained in boarding schools. A few of these bands survive, such as the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Band of Arizona and Nevada, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2006.

But today all-Indian high school bands are rare, said Georgia Wettlin-Larsen, director of the First Nations Composer Initiative. Musical education, beyond culturally-based drumming and singing, is almost nonexistent in tribal schools, she said. That makes Cournoyer’s program both distinctive and important.

The high cost of music instruction is a common barrier, but the Standing Rock Sioux community, where unemployment hovers around 70 percent, does not let that stand in the band’s way. The school district buys all the instruments, although the band lacks marching harnesses, equipment to support massive instruments such as tubas.

“We don’t have tubas, so I substitute with bass lines,” Cournoyer explained. “What we do is get a flatbed truck, we put a generator on there, we plug in the electric bass, and we play.”

In the 10 years since the band started—with 14 kids—nearly 100 percent of the band members have graduated. Some of them have used the discipline gained from learning to play music to go to two- or four-year colleges.

This year the band began a collaboration with Courtney Yellow Fat, the lead singer of Grammy-nominated powwow drum group Lakota Thunder and a culture and language teacher at Standing Rock Middle School.

Cournoyer worked with Yellow Fat to as she wrote sheet music for an ancient Lakota song so her student band could play it. The song, “The Land You Fear,” which originated before Columbus landed in the Americas, had not been written down before, like much indigenous music.

“That song was meant for a warrior to go off to war and not have any fear,” Yellow Fat said. “In contemporary times, we put out a warrior who must be a well-rounded person, who must be a warrior for the people.”

The New York debut of the song came at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, with Cournoyer playing the cedar flute, Yellow Fat singing and the band playing.

It is the band teacher’s prayer that her students, as the ancient song says, will learn to walk with victory, instead of fear: “I want them to know that this world is bigger than they think it is, and that they are capable of so much more than they think they are.”

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Photo by Graham F. Page, courtesy Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Jimi Hendrix, the Royal Albert Hall, London, Feb. 18, 1969.

Hendrix—who not only identified himself as Cherokee but also performed at Woodstock in buckskin, and elsewhere wearing a hand-beaded jacket—is featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian called “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.”

Ron Welburn, a Native poet and English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who contributed a chapter to the book accompanying the exhibition, explains that the roots of the blues lie deep in Native America. It was the blues guitar that Hendrix taught himself as a young man.

The blues were born at a unique moment in history when the slave trade and colonization of the American South forced people and their musical traditions together, he said. The blues came to life on the Tuscarora Indian trails that the Underground Railroad followed across the Niagara River to the Six Nations and freedom, said Elaine Bomberry, host of “Rez Bluez,” a show on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada.

The blues peculate up from the soil of the experience of stolen peoples and stolen lands.

“There are things (in blues music) that say to me that someone knows something about stomp dancing,” said Welburn, who is Gingaskin and Assateague, Cherokee and African American. “It’s the call-and-response phrasing, and the length of the statement, which may be longer than the response.”

The chika-ching syncopation, pioneered in jazz by innovative Mohawk and African drummer Jesse Price, sounds much like the bells or deer hooves that Native dancers wear. As Oscar Pettiford, the Cherokee, Choctaw and African-American bandleader, told  Jazz Times in 1960, it’s jazz attempting over and over to render an American Indian beat.

Or as Carlos Santana said in 1995 to “UniVibes,” a Hendrix fanzine, “Most music comes from Indian reservations,” from cultural and spiritual practices interpreted by “just two people—Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, you know.”

Late in his life, Hendrix drew on these Native roots for help.

Hendrix traveled to the Tuscarora reservation in New York to seek a cure for sleeping problems with medicine man Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson, said nephew Wray Anderson. The elder Anderson agreed to help Hendrix obtain a cure, but told the musician he would have to give up his prescription drugs. Hendrix set a time to return after the Isle of Wight Festival in England in 1970. He died before he could.

As the exhibition’s text muses, “Out of the struggles and triumphs, African-Native American people have created cultural innovations by bringing together sensibilities from two ancient and beloved continents. By ‘eating out of the same pot,’ delicious cultural fusions arise, such as gumbo and the blues.”

View the exhibition online at www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible/ or buy the book at www.nmai.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=shop&second=books&third=IndiVisible.

Hendrix at Woodstock

By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

Download this article as a Word document.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian. Murray Porter, Mohawk, leads the Rez Bluez All-Starz in concert at the museum. In his signature tune “Colours,” Porter sings, “He’s a red man, singing the black man’s blues, living in a white man’s world.”

But Elaine Bomberry, host of “Rez Bluez,” a show on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada, explained to an audience at the National Museum of the American Indian that the roots of this American form of music also extend deep into Native American musical traditions.

“The whole heartbeat of the blues is very much like our drum,” Bomberry said, during a discussion called “The Blues: Roots, Branches and Beyond.”

Ron Welburn, a Native poet and scholar of jazz, said that he can hear the influences of music from many Native nations on early blues recordings.

“There are things that say to me that someone knows something about stomp dancing, a part of Southeastern Native American music from before European contact,” he said. “It’s the call-and-response phrasing, and the length of the statement, which may be longer than the response.”

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian Corey Harris, performing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, is a student of anthropology and linguistics, and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient. Harris, who is Cherokee, Creek and Chickasaw, said, “Africans being taken in by Native American communities was always spoken of in our families….You couldn’t see it in a book, but it was passed down through families.”

The Aug. 22 conversation was followed by a concert in the museum’s Indian Summer Showcase series. Performances featured blues artists George Leach of the Sta’atl’imx Nation in British Columbia; the Rez Bluez All-Starz with Murray Porter, Mohawk, and Beaver Thomas, who is Cowesseness First Nation; plus special guests Corey Harris, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” and string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

The blues were birthed in a unique moment of history when the slave trade and colonization of the American South forced people and their musical traditions to come together, explained Welburn, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American IndianGeorge Leach, Sta’atl’imx, won Best Male Artist of the Year and Best Rock Album at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards in 2000 for his debut album, “Just Where I’m At.” Denis Rondeau plays bass behind Leach at a National Museum of the American Indian’s Summer Showcase concert.

Plantations brought together Irish indentured servants, African slaves and also Native slaves. “All lived together, all procreated together,” said Justin Robinson of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Later escaped slaves found refuge in Native communities from the South and, in time, up the Underground Railroad to the Six Nations in Canada.

“The Underground Railroad was Tuscarora Indian trails to the Niagara River and across. Tuscaroras would bring the escaped slaves across to Six Nations, where I’m from,” Bomberry said. Watch a clip from Bomberry’stelevision show at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpi_vQOb4w.

When the blues began to be recorded in the early 20th century, many artists self-identified as Native American. Welburn said Charley Patton, who is called the father of Mississippi Delta blues, was Choctaw. Scrapper Blackwell was Eastern Band Cherokee. Listen to Blackwell atwww.youtube.com/watch?v=yjZO44o0E8A.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian The Carolina Chocolate Drops—Dom Flemons on four-string banjo, guitar, jug, harmonica, kazoo, snare drum, and bones; and Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson on fiddle and five-string banjo—strive to carry on the traditional music of the communities of the Carolina Piedmont.

But ancestry isn’t as important to musicologists as what can be documented in the music, said Welburn, who is Gingaskin/Assateague, Cherokee and African American.

“They want to know what a person picked up from another musical source, like four beats to the measure,” he said. “Powwow drumming is four beats to a measure.”

Welburn counts: boom, boom, boom, boom. He hears this beat in the earliest blues recordings, though later it would be expanded upon.

“‘Chika, ching, chika, ching, chika, ching’ was started by a drummer—a Mohawk and African American guy, Jesse Price,” he said. Price lived in Kansas City and toured with the likes of Count Basie on a circuit that included Oklahoma. His peers said they believe his drumming style came from Native music.

“Because of that location you can associate certain dances,” Welburn said. “In round dancing, there is a ‘chika, ching’ syncopation. Even guys who have bells or deer toes on garters make a similar sound walking around.”

The blues’ call-and-response song structure, which has been attributed to African-American folk music, may also have older roots in Native American music. “It’s not a matter of someone trying to take credit,” Welburn said. “It’s about finding the roots.”

Blues and jazz artists have made similar observations.

Oscar Pettiford, the late Cherokee, Choctaw and African-American bandleader, gave an interview in 1960 to the magazine Jazz Times, in which he stated that jazz attempts to render an American Indian beat.

By Katherine Fogden, National Museum of the American Indian Blues singer and bass player Shakti Hayes, Plains Cree, of the Rez Bluez All-Starz performs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian with guitarist Beaver Thomas, Plains Cree from the Cowessess First Nation. Thomas has opened for country star Dwight Yoakam.

In the 1970s, Welburn remembers Lewis McMillan, a drummer with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra who was mixed-race Cherokee, telling him, “Ronny, don’t ever let anyone tell you that our people didn’t have anything to do with jazz.”

Recently, singer and percussionist Cyril Neville, the youngest of the famed New Orleans’ group the Neville Brothers, told Bomberry, “Sister, we both own the blues.”

Murray Porter, who first heard B.B. King as a teenager at the Six Nations in Ontario while listening late into the night to radio from Chicago, said the genre has always been about cross-pollination.

“It’s not an African thing; it’s not a Native thing,’’ he said. Later, in concert before more than 1,000 people at the museum, he improvised a sort of musical invocation, singing, “Everybody get together. Everybody get together. Everybody get together and let the good times roll.”