Sainte-Marie Sings a New Song

Depending on when you were born, you probably have a different memory of Buffy Sainte-Marie. For baby boomers, she was an idiosyncratic folk singer whose peers included Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Mimi Fariña, and others in the nascent folk movement of the early 1960s, with a signature vibrato that frequently dominated her own guitar accompaniment and the confinement of record grooves. For the children of baby boomers, she wasn't Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Native American protest singer, but rather Big Bird's friend on "Sesame Street," the only other person who could see Snuffleupagus, that giant shaggy brown elephant invisible to everyone else. As a second act in Ms. Sainte-Marie's long career, it only seems incongruent.

"It really was a continuation of the unique variety work I had been doing in music," Ms. Sainte-Marie said via telephone from her home in Hawaii as she packed her bags for two shows in New York this week. "It wasn't about music, but it was about the points the songs were making. Each program had meaning." During her five-year stint on the iconic children's program, Ms. Sainte-Marie appeared alongside her young son, Dakota Starblanket Wolfchild, as "Sesame Street" discussed such topics as racial harmony, breast-feeding, sibling rivalry, and Native American culture.

Born on a Cree reservation in Saskatchewan in 1941, Ms. Sainte-Marie was adopted by a Caucasian family and spent her formative years moving between Boston and Maine. "My biggest toy was a piano, which I first saw when I was about three, and that's all I wanted to do after that, make music and art, dance around the house," she said. There were few role models for her music-making or for helping this deracinated child understand her Native American heritage. "When I was growing up there was only one other Indian in the town and he was the mailman. There weren't any sources when I was growing up aside from this one person, who gave me a sense of authenticity and reality and personhood."

After studying Oriental philosophies in college, Ms. Sainte-Marie's penchant for writing led her to the coffee shops of Greenwich Village. "My music was pretty much private between me and myself," she said. "I was there not as a singer but as a songwriter. I thought I could get other people to sing my songs. All of a sudden I was signed to Vanguard."

Whether writing songs about the plight of her native people ("Now That the Buffalo's Gone"), the specter of war ("Universal Soldier"), or the temporal aspects of love ("Until It's Time for You To Go"), Ms. Sainte-Marie's songs did indeed find much of their success in the throats of others; Donovan, Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, Roberta Flack, and Elvis Presley also scored hits with her compositions. In turn, Ms. Sainte-Marie was an early champion for the likes of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Her recitation of an early Cohen poem ("God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot") through the burgeoning technologies of the Buchla synthesizer resulted in "Illuminations," her landmark 1969 recording of both folk and avant-garde electronic music. To this day, she remains proud of this trailblazing (though misunderstood) document. "I came from a place of being curious about sound," she said. "Whatever kind of instrument you use to make the song, I was interested in the sound. I was just happy to come across sound in new ways."

So while her live performances still offer the folk hits, Ms. Sainte-Marie has continued to delve into technologies and weird sounds, helping future husband Jack Nitzsche on his mind-altering soundtrack to British art film "Performance," as well as working with electronic musicians on her own. "I continued to hang out with people that folkies would've not understood, not in keeping with the folk genre," she said. "I was not interested in that, anyway. I was interested in music that sounded great and I thought was exciting. Electronic music was part of that."

Such indoctrination also helped Ms. Sainte-Marie adapt when a new device, the personal computer, hit the scene. Buying the first Macintosh when it went on the market for both her visual and aural art, she immediately created some of the first computer-generated artwork shown in galleries.

"I was fearless about computers because I had entered it through electronic music, so I wasn't scared, she said. "I didn't associate it with pie charts; it wasn't office stuff for me. It was a tool to make music."

Thus we enter Ms. Sainte-Marie's third act, as a pioneering computer artist. Tonight, after intermittent returns to the studio (her last studio album was released in 1996) she'll be returning to play old favorites.

"I never did stop doing a show of songwriter favorites," she said, adding that she would also feature songs from a brand new album, claiming with a laugh: "It's so new my agent just got it."

Ms. Sainte-Marie performs tonight at the Highline Ballroom (431 W. 16th St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues, 212-414-5994).