Peter LaFarge

Album: On The Warpath

Peter Lafarge was born on April 30, 1931, and that is important for me because I was born April 29, 1981. There is a variance, sure, but there is enough similarity there for my ears to perk up.

He is probably most famously known as “the guy who wrote those songs that Johnny cash sang,” and, most notably, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”

And when they think that they'd changed me cut my hair to meet their needs
Will they think I'm white or Indian, quarter blood or just half breed?
Let me tell you, Mr teacher, when you say you'll make me right
In five hundred years of fighting not one Indian turned white

He was, however, a musician in his own right, and ran in the Greenwich village circles of the 60’s. His was the kind of protest music was rarely, if ever, heard, though people like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan would promote his music for years, even after his death in 1965.

Actually, Peter is one of the unsung heroes of the day. His style was just a little bit too erratic. But it wasn’t his fault, he was always hurting and having to overcome it.

Perhaps only a few people ever listened to LaFarge when he was actively protesting with his music. I wasn’t even able to find the lyrics to his songs through a “Lafarge-lyrics” search and had to resort to looking up the lyrics to Johnny Cash’s LaFarge tribute album, Bitter Tears.

I decided that was a good thing, because it made me listen to LaFarge, and listening to LaFarge means listening to his people, his land, and their stories.

Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lyin' thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died

And, when I listened to the words, instead of reading them, I heard the drums. The single, most solitary musical motif throughout LaFarge’s Warpath (and I would argue, throughout his entire body of work) is the drumbeat. I heard that beat at recent powwow I attended in Lansing, Michgan, and my body recognized it, together with my mind and my soul, when I heard it in LaFarge’s music.

And there are drums beyond the mountain, Indian drums that you can't hear
There are drums beyond the mountain and they're getting mighty near

LaFarge was born on April 30, 1932, and he died young, at age 34. But, his ghost, his music, and his message(s) still resonate, even if only some people can hear him.