American music took shape and went global thanks to the country’s melting pot of influences. Yet, one of the most important sources of the sound often goes forgotten — Native Americans.
A new documentary, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, shines a new light on the history and traces how Native Americans’ rhythms, singing and dancing helped set the course of American music.
“I started, just out of curiosity, to look around for more people like myself. Are there other Native American people doing what I do?” asked Stevie Salas, a guitarist of Apache origin who is the executive producer of the film, which is screening in New York before its broadcast in December on Arte, the French-German cultural channel that coproduced it.
“It seemed like I couldn’t find any, but then as I would start to dig I started to realize: There were a lot, it’s just people didn’t know it,” he said.
Native Americans, decimated by invasion, were not considered US citizens until 1924 — more than 50 years after African-Americans — and continue to lag behind in social indicators.
In one of the final, but most notorious acts of the conquest of the US west, US troops shot dead 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890 as they crushed the burgeoning “Ghost Dance” musical and spiritual movement.
“They went after our culture. It was genocide and they wanted to erase every cultural perception of reality that we had,” John Trudell, a musician and activist who is Santee Dakota, says in the documentary.
Charley Patton, often considered the father of the blues, as he honed his guitar style in early 20th-century Mississippi, was believed to be at least partially of Choctaw heritage.
His ancestry is traced in The Encyclopedia of Native Music by Canadian scholar Brian Wright-McLeod, which forms the basis of the documentary.
The film shows that Native American ancestry is more than a footnote, with Patton’s rhythms and singing owing both to African and indigenous roots.
Other key musicians of Native American origin include Link Wray, whose distorted guitar was a major influence on the development of rock — and whose song Rumble provides the film’s title.
“There might not be a Who, there might not be a Jeff Beck Group, there might not be a Led Zeppelin if there were no Link Wray,” Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins says in the film.
Rumble is driven by interviews with an impressive array of stars — a deliberate move to give credibility for viewers unfamiliar with Native Americans’ impact, Salas said.
“Rumble had the power to push me over the edge,” punk icon Iggy Pop says. “And it did help me say: ‘Fuck it, I’m going to be a musician.’”
By the 1960s, major artists began to celebrate their Native American heritage openly, including Canadian folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and Jesse Ed Davis, a guitarist who recorded with members of The Beatles and Eric Clapton.
More recent figures include rapper Taboo of The Black Eyed Peas, who has used his platform to campaign for causes including opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline on Native American lands.
Other artists who were partially of Native American origin included Jimi Hendrix, who grew up hearing stories from his part-Cherokee grandmother, and possibly Elvis Presley.
However, broader recognition of Native American contributions has taken longer.
“It wasn’t until the ’90s when Dances With Wolves came out — I know it sounds crazy — that America accepted this love of native culture,” he said.
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