Episode 5: It’s My Way

VMP Anthology

In this episode, we cover the fourth album in your box, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s debut LP, It’s My Way! It’s hard to find a folk debut as daring, jarring and impactful as Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Vanguard debut in 1964. That year, folk was at its highest peak of popularity, the same year Beatlemania made landfall on American shores, but there was no performer in music as direct as Sainte-Marie. And few were as prolific. As she told writer Andrea Warner for her authorized biography, she had written somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 songs by the time she recorded her debut.

In this episode, we talk with folk and blues scholar and writer Elijah Wald about how after the explosion following Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie — who, just 4 years earlier, might have been a risk for Vanguard — was part of a continuum of folk singers exploding at the time. We talk about how Buffy was both outside the mainstream, but also part of the wave of performers who benefitted from emerging college radio. We also talk about how underrated Sainte-Marie is, and how she’s one of the best folk songwriters of the era.