THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS PRESENT "DOUBLE TROUBLE"- CULTURAL APPROPRIATION WITH PETER LA FARGE AND JOHNNY CASH. DOUBLE DOWN!!

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5d ago 10:50

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This nation’s troubled history with Manifest Destiny will continue to haunt us for some time. Throughout the decades some Native voices have emerged and contributed to the ongoing cultural conversation: most recently on the Broadway stage, on film, and television, and this awareness might move us towards some, if not restitution for atrocities past, at least a dialogue that might point the way towards the future.

Today Double Trouble features the efforts of two important Americana artists, neither one Native American, but both identifying with them. Johnny Cash believed that he was part Cherokee- (a notion disproved by DNA). They both raised their voices in advocacy with the dispossessed. Pete La Farge wrote The Ballad of Ira Hayes, which Johnny Cash delivers here, and then Mr. La Farge himself mourns the disappearance of the Coyote as a consequence of Capitalism’s rapacious destruction of sacred lands.

JOHNNY CASH

From his 1963 concept album “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian”, The Ballad of Ira Hayes tells the story of a WW2 War Hero, one of the men raising the flag over Iwo Jima in that iconic photo. Upon returning to the states, Ira had to confront the irony of his impossibly low status on home soil, and descended into alcohol addiction and death. Pete La Farge wrote 5 of the songs on Cash’s album, and became known, along with Buffy St. Marie, as one of the most prominent singer-songwriters concerned with Native themes.

Johnny Cash was a life-long representative of Native peoples, trying through his popular status to bring about an awareness of the wrongs that had been committed in the name of “progress”.

PETE LA FARGE

Given the focus of his creative output during his short life - he died, age 34, of a stroke - one might assume that Mr. La Farge was Native American, but not so: he was the son of an anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and a Rhode Island heiress. Growing up in New Mexico and Colorado, he developed a love of Native American culture, and that became his artistic touchstone.

Most famous for The Ballad of Ira Hayes, his tribute to a discarded, fallen hero, the song has been covered by Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger among many others. Here, in Coyote, La Farge channels the mournful sound of the dispossessed animal as it fades away into the ether, after losing its habitat to business interests - an issue we’re still dealing with today.

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