Buffy Sainte-Marie shines despite sabotage in new documentary 'Carry It On'
The coffeehouse musicians that were the dominant force in the U.S. during the folk-heavy 1950s and early '60s have been experiencing a mini-renaissance lately. It started with excitement over Joni Mitchell's return to the stage, then Bob Dylan's new museum and book and now a documentary spotlighting one of the era's top voices as "Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On" hits PBS this week.
The 81-year-old Canadian Cree Nation singer's career has spanned the decades with huge hits in the '60s like "The Universal Soldier," "Cod'ine" and "Until It's Time for You to Go," through her Oscar-winning tune, "Up Where We Belong," in 1983 and even to 2015, when her "Power in the Blood" album was named the winner of the Polaris Music Prize. Her songs have been covered and rerecorded by many artists including Donovan, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Barbra Streisand and Glen Campbell. Her activism on behalf on Indigenous people has never wavered, and she's also an accomplished visual artist as well.
In 1969, she made one of the world's first electronic vocal albums; in 1983, she became the first and only Indigenous person to win an Oscar; and she spent five years on "Sesame Street" where she became the first woman to breastfeed on national television.
Despite all of this, she's not
