It’s My Way! is the first album by folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. Though the album did not chart, it proved influential in the folk community. It is most famous for two widely covered folk standards, “Universal Soldier” and “Cod’ine”, as well as “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone”, a lament about the continued confiscation of Indian lands, as evidenced by the building of the Kinzua Dam in about 1964. The cover features a mouthbow, which was to be a trademark of her sound on her first three albums. “Cod’ine” was also lyrically altered by Janis Joplin and appears on This is Janis Joplin 1965. (More from Wikipedia)
Songwriting credits were not handled so scrupulously back then anyway, and those practices continued at least through the end of the 1960’s. I have already mentioned in previous posts that Buffy Sainte-Marie showed her own name as the songwriter of “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond” on her debut album It’s My Way!; and that Deep Purple claimed to be the writer of “Hey Joe” on their 1968 debut album, Shades of Deep Purple (the musical bridge before the song was their work, but “Hey Joe” had already been a hit song several times by then).
(February 2015)
