Buddy Red Bow
Journey to the Spirit World
1983 | Country
— track 3: “Where’s Ben Black Elk Today?”
Buddy Red Bow: A lot of the things I write about are real country, they are about the hard times. If anybody in this world can sing about the hard times, an Indian can, because we’ve been there, and in a lot of ways are still there. Things that happened to us centuries ago, a few hundred years ago, are still happening, are reality. My songs are the stories of my people, but I’m not singing to make people feel bad. I’m singing so people might get a clearer view of us. My songs are the way I see the truth. I lived a different life than a Bob Dylan or a John Denver because they grew up in a white world. I live in both worlds now, but I lived in the Indian world and I grew up with pride. I grew up with going to powwows and the drum beat was always in my heart. There was a lot of times — when I first started, let’s take an example, I was just singing country/western songs about honkytonks and stuff, but that wasn’t me really, that wasn’t my life. My life was in the Badlands, and in the beautiful Black Hills, and telling legends. Because I always listened to my grandfathers and the elders, I put some of those legends to music, and I realized that was my goal, that’s what I’m doing.
They say a lot of the things that I want to put out are so political. People are scared of the things I’m saying through my music. They’re saying I’ll just put more wood on the fire if I go out and do what I’m doing. What I’m trying to get across to them is to try to go and learn about the real American Indian, to learn what they’re really made of, not what they hear about in the news. See, if I was to go downtown and run over a bunch of people and shoot up a bank, they’ll have me plastered all over the papers, the front page and everything. But what I’m doing now, I’ve got little or no publicity. I’m trying to do something good for the Indian.
95% of the people aren’t going to go out and listen to somebody talk for an hour, you know? But if you put it to music — there’s a lot of living rooms that I can sneak into with my music that I couldn’t get into if I was just talking. A lot of times we have not written it down or put it in a song or movie, so I felt it my duty to put this album out to tell their story. I’m telling the truth as I perceive it. Does that make me militant? Let’s face it, there are still problems on the reservation, and if you don’t believe that, just go to one and spend some time.
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Stardust Red Bow: I’m Buddy’s daughter. Buddy was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation [in 1948], raised in the Oglala and the Red Shirt area.
[At age 1, Buddy was left by his mother on the steps of the Pine Ridge jail.]
Buddy Red Bow: It’s not something I would wish upon anyone. I had my own cell and everything. That’s why when I get put in jail now, it doesn’t bother me much. I feel right at home. Never for anything big. Sometimes I get put in jail for something as simple as protesting against discrimination.
Stardust Red Bow: They brought him to the jail because there wasn’t an orphanage or any place to take children back then. He was adopted by Maize and Stephen Red Bow, and they raised him and really supported him musically. His uncle was the reverend at the Episcopalian Church on the reservation there in Red Shirt, still is, so he was growing up singing in the church with his relatives. Growing up as a little boy he would sing to entertain his friends and adults. The Lakota sing a lot, with powwows and just in general. Traditionally, there was a lot of singing in the family.
Buddy Red Bow: When I grew up I was fortunate to have a lot of the traditional Indians around me. I hung out with them more than I did with the church-going people. My grandmother used to go to church, in fact she used to have me sing in a church, but I was always longing to go to a yuwipi or powwows. Powwows were the highlight of my life every year. When I reflect back on my life as a young boy, there were really some nice days playing in the Cheyenne River, not knowing what a fast world it is out there. It’s the most beautiful place in the world. I would never leave it. I may go away for a while, but I always come back.
Stardust Red Bow: If you look at rural South Dakota, country/western is the genre. Along with the storytelling of the folk genre. Growing up, being around horses, ranching, it fits out here.
Buddy Red Bow: I’ve been performing since I was seven on the road, playing here and there. My uncle would stand me up right on the bar and I would sing Hank Williams songs. That’s where I got my first shot at singing. Then when I got to Pine Ridge High School, I learned to play guitar.
Stardust Red Bow: When he was 16, I’m pretty sure my dates are right, he left to go be an actor. My dad could be a little bit of a storyteller, just a little [laughs], so the school wasn’t entirely sure that what he was telling them was accurate information. His parents had to go in and explain that, yes, he actually was going to Hollywood to do some filmmaking. So he went off and did How the West Was Won, and some other things.
Buddy Red Bow: When I was about 19 years old, the first professional show that I did was in Los Angeles at the Palomino Club. A friend of mine was playing there and they had a talent show. I went on there and I sang, “Run, Indian, Run” and I won the talent show.
Stardust Red Bow: When he enlisted in the Marines, he listed his occupation as “actor.” Percentage-wise per population, Lakota tend to serve in the military at a higher rate. His dad was in World War II. They very much valued the warrior tradition. My dad was a Marine in Vietnam, and was a sniper. [After Vietnam] he goes home to the reservation with the Red Bows because he needed to help them with their ranch. His dad had some physical health problems as a result of some injuries in World War II, so [Buddy] came home to help with the ranch, and to make sure the family business was going well. So then when he was back, that was when more of the music focus happened. And it’s always hard to say, “Oh he lived here for X number of years.” He lived here, then he traveled here, then he was in Europe, then he came back, then he was in the Southwest, then he was back in South Dakota. He’d go to Colorado to record with his producer Dik Darnell. They were very close as friends. And Dik knew the business side of music, which — my dad was creative, and in the music industry you need both. Dik understood where my dad was coming from creatively, and my dad knew that Dik could help him.
Buddy Red Bow: The love that [Dik Darnell] has for the American Indian is unbelievable. He feels what I feel in my heart. He knew I had this dream for ten years and he said, “Are you ready to do it?” And I said, “I sure am.”
Stardust Red Bow: BRB, that was his first album, and Black Hills Dreamer, that was his last one. So Journey to the Spirit World hits right in the middle between those two.
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Buddy Red Bow: We’ve been putting this album together for ten years, me and my producer Dik Darnell. To me, Journey to the Spirit World is a spiritual album. Every song in it is very special to me — I jump around a lot, that’s just my style — but all of them show the meaning of the Indian religion. All the songs in it have a message. They’re the message that a lot of the American Indians want to say. And I think this will make them very proud because it uplifts them. Journey to the Spirit World tells you to get yourself ready spiritually for the other world.
Stardust Red Bow: My dad had two children that died as babies from SIDS, and that did have an impact on him. Going through that tragedy, no one ever wants to lose a child. I think his outlet was his music in everything he went through: positive, negative, any experience he had he expressed it in his music.
Dik Darnell: We were going to do the funeral down there in Red Shirt Table, Buddy had been pretty wiped out, he had been drinking, and he was in no shape to do anything, he couldn’t face it. Journey to the Spirit World finally came to life as a result of him needing to distract himself from the sorrow he had. And of course the failure that he felt he had inside himself, as a father, as a person trying to represent his people. He felt all those failings.
Buddy Red Bow: There’s seven songs on the album. They all intertwine, the songs, they all tell a story. So from the beginning to the end when you listen to this album there’s no stopping. I’m going to have The Sons of the Oglalas doing some Indian music, and the wind and the sound effects, and The Red Cloud Singers, and maybe some talking from Grandpa Fools Crow and some of the elders, with little children mixed in there.
The first [song is] the title cut: “Journey to the Spirit World,” it’s a belief that I really believe in, that when you die you go to another world, your spirit leaves. My grandfathers used to tell me the story, so I thought I’d put it into song. It says in the song to get yourself ready. Prepare yourself every day. I think, the American Indian, from the day they’re born they’re preparing themselves to die. Every day, I always get up and I’m happy to see the sun. I’m always happy to be alive. But I’m ready, when it’s time to go, I feel I’ve prepared myself, even if it happens at this moment.
“Wounded Knee” is my song for my grandpa. It’s my history too. I walked with Grandpa up to Stronghold. He showed me where he stood guard as a boy, with his feet wrapped in rags against the cold. I’d like to be remembered for that song. [Growing up, I asked,] “Grandpa, why do you tell me [the story of surviving Wounded Knee] over and over? I’ve heard it so many times.” “Buddy, I have to,” Grandfather answered. “I want you to remember this story. Tell it to the people.”
“Where’s Ben Black Elk Today?” tells about — Ben was at one time considered the most photographed Indian in the world. [He] used to sit up here at Mount Rushmore and greet millions of tourists with a smile and everything, and while things were going down around him he was always really happy to greet children and people. A lot of people thought, “Why are you sitting here? You should be bitter because they took your Black Hills and everything.” But he was a very beautiful ambassador for us.
“My Friend, the Buffalo” is about the most beautiful animal that I think is on this earth, I’ve always loved the buffalo, for the strength and courage, and all it’s given to us spiritually and physically. It’s always been a symbol that we’re still alive, the American Indian. One time I was sitting with my grandfather, we live out in the Badlands, and we were looking out towards the Black Hills, and he said, “I’d like to go out there just one more time and see the buffalo.”
This here other song is called “Thunder Bird.” Now this is a legend that my grandfather Pete Two Bulls used to tell me when I was a little boy growing up. The legend goes that once there was a Indian here in the Black Hills hunting and he came upon a giant bird that had crashed and broken its wing. And when he approached the bird to help it, every time the bird would open its eyes, lightning bolts would flash out of them so he couldn’t get near it. So the Indian told the giant bird, “If you keep your eyes closed and trust me, Brother, I’ll fix you and you can go on home.” Which he did. And when the giant bird was ready to leave he told the Indian, he said, “When you die, the journey to the other world is a long, long journey, but for you helping me, I’m going to give you a ride to the other world, to the spirit world. So when you hear the thunder roaring and the lightning flashing you be ready I’ll come and take you home.”
Stardust Red Bow: [The sound of the album] is almost surreal, other-worldly influenced. A lot of the nature sounds, the artistic interpretation of the world around us.
Buddy Red Bow: [Music producer Dik Darnell] did everything for me. I’m thankful he’s put up with me all these years.
Dik Darnell: When it came to the production part of it, Buddy turned that all over to me. Musically, Buddy was acoustic guitar and a voice and he wanted a band around him, so I always arranged the songs for him and put it together in that way. It wasn’t complicated in the sense of how we worked together because it was actually very flowing and very easy.
Buddy Red Bow: Me and Dik Darnell and Don Robinson, the three of us own the Tatanka label. If there’s anything Tatanka Records wants to do, it’s to make the American Indian people very proud of themselves. We did a record with Grandpa Fools Crow on that label and we hope to be doing other artists too on that label.
Stardust Red Bow: [The album] Fools Crow was before BRB. My dad did the Sun Dance and he was trained under Fools Crow. [Buddy] was the youngest one to lead the Sun Dance.
Dik Darnell: [BRB], was the first album, it was the rookie’s launch. So we had an album and we said, “What’ll we do? We’ll have to have a radio tour and try to get radio stations to play it.” That was the big learning curve that we had to go through.
Buddy Red Bow: We want as many of the songs on the album to be played on as many radio stations as possible. I need to get on top so I can do some money-making stuff. [Promoting the album] means knocking on a lot of doors, getting a foot in, and telling our story. This is tough work. Sometimes I get misquoted and it really sets me back. For instance, one TV announcer said I was the only Indian recording artist, and that just isn’t true. There are many fine Indian recording artists trying to break into the field, but you just don’t hear about them. I’ve been trying to make a go of success for a long time and it has been a struggle.
Dik Darnell: I thought for sure that there were some songs that country radio would play. We got rejected, we got rejected, we got rejected. That was a brick wall. I’ll never forget the program director in Vermillion, I can’t remember the station, but he was the first one to say to me, “I got my own problems, I don’t have time for the Indian problem.”
Buddy Red Bow: No matter how tough it gets, you can’t ever stop following those dreams. Without them, your life is not worth living.
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Stardust Red Bow: It’s no secret that my dad was an alcoholic. That sometimes comes with the music industry and entertainment industry. Now we know, and can say with certainty that my dad had PTSD. As a Vietnam combat veteran, today my dad would have been considered fully disabled because of the PTSD. He would wake up with night terrors, he had seen a lot of horrific things, and I do believe it contributed to his alcoholism. The excess that he took it to wouldn’t have been the same had he not had PTSD. His PTSD went untreated. He never set foot in a VA, as far as I know. He had this view, this vision of what he wanted to be, and a disabled veteran was not one of them. He saw himself as a musician, an entertainer, an actor, father, son, and those roles were far more important to him. The times we were together, he was sober, and we had a better relationship because of it. He’d have these moments of, “Okay he’s taking off now, there’s going to be success,” and then all the sudden he does something almost self-sabotaging it. I think for him, it was both a fear of success and a fear of failure. Fear that if he succeeded, he would be separated from his friends and family and community, and more isolated, and then also that fear of if he had all that support and the resources behind him, there shouldn’t have been a reason for him to fail.
Dik Darnell: We made [a third] album [Black Hills Dreamer], and he’s alcohol free, and he’s clean, and he’s doing well, and excited about it. But then when it couldn’t go anywhere it put him back in his stoop. Rejection is a horrible thing. We didn’t have pipe dreams thinking this was going to be an enormous success. We would have been happy with moderate success. Or just mediocre success, but we didn’t even get to the mediocre level. There just wasn’t a market for the type of music he was doing at that time. When we got [Black Hills Dreamer] done, and put it out, he saw that it wasn’t going to go anywhere again. So after we did that round of visiting everybody, he went back to Rapid, and I think he purposefully drank himself to death. That was just my personal feeling about that. He thought there was just no point anymore.
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Dik Darnell: Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Red Bow were the first two Native Americans inducted into the Native American [Music Awards] Hall of Fame.
Stardust Red Bow: My dad always saw this world as temporary, and his time on it as limited. Mom said it is something that he always thought, that he wouldn’t live a long life, and picture himself as an old man somewhere playing guitar. That wasn’t something that was important to him, however, the vision of a better society was. Living a high quality of life while you can, to him was more important to him than how long he lived.
Buddy Red Bow: If we don’t put our love and our energy into our children, the world is going to turn harder. There are some Indians who just don’t want to see another Indian get ahead. If you make a lot of money, are you going to become an apple (red on the outside, white in the center) and move to the city and forget about us? This really hurts, because I was born an Indian and nothing will ever change that. Look at the black people, they support each other in the recording industry. That’s what we, as Indians, should be doing.
Stardust Red Bow: Dik and I have talked about, “How can we get the music out there?” Dik Darnell has the rights. And I know he’s working on trying to get, at least digitally, some of the music released on different platforms. We’re still very protective over how it’s distributed and what the messaging is behind how it’s used so it doesn’t just end up anywhere. But I would like it to be more accessible to people.
Words to describe him would be: entertainer, charismatic, he just had a way of drawing people in. He loved being center stage, being that person to give people that break away from whatever stress they were experiencing, and refocus on what he thought of as more important things. He had such a distinct way of dressing. The cowboy boots, the blue jeans, the shiny Western shirts. He was always aware if he went out in public he had an image. He saw his role as someone who could make people laugh and make people happy, so he loved telling stories. I think it brought him as much joy as it did others. My dad was one of a kind. You’d have to be, to have a hat like that. Not many people could pull it off.
I still hear people say, “That song means so much to me,” or “My mom or my grandmother used to listen to this,” or “This reminded me of when I was little.” So I think there are a lot of families that listened to it together. I was at work one day and a veteran stopped me and asked if I was related to Buddy Red Bow. He shared that he knew him before he went to Vietnam. I like hearing that because I know that’s what my dad wanted. He wanted to get his music out there and he wanted people to enjoy it. That was the ultimate goal.
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SOURCES
Beem, Katy. “Red Bow: Remembering the Lakota Country Music Artist.” SDPB, 18 Sept. 2019, https://www.sdpb.org/blogs/arts-and-culture/red-bow-1/.
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Jackson, Christine. “Red Bow to Record New Album.” Newspapers.com, Rapid City Journal, 11 Aug. 1989, https://www.newspapers.com/image/350868253/?terms=%22buddy+red+bow%22&match=2.
Nauman, H. Jane. “Lakota Singer-Guitarist Launches New Album of His Native Songs.” Newspapers.com, Rapid City Journal, 24 Feb. 1984, https://www.newspapers.com/image/350744906/?terms=%22Buddy+red+bow%22+journey+to+the+spirit+world&match=1.
Nauman, Talli. “Red Bow Sings a Message of Indian Life.” Newspapers.com, Albuquerque Journal, 6 Apr. 1984, https://www.newspapers.com/image/158494213/?terms=%22Buddy+Red+Bow%22&match=1.
Red Bow, Stardust. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 28 Oct. 2021.
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