Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Peter Bucking Horse

He died from an overdose of cobra venom. That was one story. Or he killed himself with seconal or speed or alcohol or a savage overdose of the ragged-edge doldrums that subverted and sunk his erratic, artistic struggle. He walked across the 60’s Greenwich Village scene like a proud and displaced Indian; slant-six Stetson and beat up Justin boots click-clacking past the dives and basket houses. Around his gut was a hand-tooled belt hitched with a trophy buckle from the bronc riding in a small town Indian rodeo. He carried fragments of a deep invisible scar at the bottom of his spine, a psychological wound from spying on drug-smuggling soldier mules during the Korean War. He was a man who rode a saddle bronc one afternoon at Madison Square Garden and then played King Lear in an off Broadway production that same evening. He was a pro boxer, poet, and playwright. One of the first of our “topical” song-writers to be signed to Columbia records; and the first to die.
On an overcast, bleak New York afternoon his Danish wife walked into their second-rate hotel room up in the east 50’s of New York City and found the body and the empty vile of cobra venom which was supposed to fight off his depression. He was the son of Oliver La Farge, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Laughing Boy,” and this boy inherited that passionate, driving ache to write about Native people, though he was not a full-blooded native person. He had a little Narragansett blood in him. His name was Peter La Farge, or “Peter Bucking Horse” as the Indians called him, and he wrote one of our finest American songs: “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” His sister lives right up the road from me here in these Chihuahuan badlands. One afternoon I took her the original 8 by 10” signed photo I found of Peter riding the great bronc “War Paint” and winning Denver in ’58. It was signed “To Woody.” I would imagine Peter had planned to deliver it to Woody Guthrie in the hospital, but Woody out-lived Peter by two years. La Farge died in 1965.
Naw, he wasn’t really a full blooded Indian. Nor was he a truly great bronc rider.
But these predilections and passions, along with the ravages of too much pain jammed into too few years, carved him up and into a Rimbaud-tinged, Cow kid-Indian poet and writer of grand power. From this western knowledge and a dose of truth-serum Peter composed “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” If God has made a better “protest” song, the Great Father has kept it to himself. The Pima Indian Ira Hayes served in WW II and helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima. He returned home to die drunk in an Arizona water ditch on barren Pima land; tribal land raped and gutted by the white man’s greed. Ira’s final departure is painted in tough, ironic lyrics:

“Then Ira started drinkin’ hard,
Jail was often his home
They let him raise the flag and lower it,
Like you’d throw a dog a bone.”

American poetry. Pure. Truth-filled. Here lies your cowboy song, amigos. This ain’t nothin' off of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Johnny Cash recorded a group of La Farge songs, but radio refused to play the single “Ira Hayes” Cash payed for a full page ad in Billboard: “radio programmers where are you guts?” Can you imagine this happening now? These were serious characters, friend. These were the times when our folk-writers: La Farge, Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Johnny Cash and others - had done time in the Army, Navy, Marines, jail, and divorce court…had been exposed to all forms of powerful hard drugs and violence; the quicksand of catastrophic romantic relationships. Who were they? Where did they go? Married; divorced; addicted; disappeared; forgotten; dead; found Jesus, Buddha; day jobs; lost…. gone to Florida or Potter’s field, or crazy in hotel rooms, back streets, and bars. Many sank to the bottom - terminally depressed when Bob Dylan weaved and danced through it all like a blacksnake with wizened biblical poet knowledge; then went on to prosper with his Picasso-esque confidence. The rest of the generation (to mimic William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsburg) went all crazy and died, some of ‘em, as the purest minds of our culture are want to do.
Peter La Farge was a “seldom man,” to steal a concept from his father. A man whose character and mettle we’ll seldom see again. His poetry still crackles and sizzles high up in the eternal folk musical air; in my gut, and in the grooves of those collections, like Cash’s “Bitter Tears.” Let us now praise little known men and half-cocked bronc riders. His ghost is lying thirsty, in that hotel room near 50th street, where the cowboy-poet died, and where, years later, Tennessee Williams would choke to death in the middle of trying to write one final dramatic line; one last American truth. Come gather round me, people, a story I will tell….

“I always love like a high jack rabbit going through a bramble.
Or a hawk up there twining the world around him just before he
falls to get the jack. Like and eight wheeler going through a Kansas
town at midnight, with only a little boy watching from his bedroom
window and riding every non-stop car out. I love like an act of nature…
but I am alone now and filled with lonely pain…pain always send me home to write.”
Peter La Farge

5 comments:

canadiankayte said...

This writing really shook me. I have to ask if the suffering and pain enables one to see the truth or is it that seeing and acknowledging truth causes pain and suffering. I long ago realized that the truth doesnt always set you free. Thank you Tom for the hours of good listening and reading you have given me.

editor said...

My dad brought home a copy of Bitter Tears for his Indian-obsessed little kid, must have been around 1970. I was really young, maybe five or six. I listened to that record obsessively, made my mom put it on over and over again.

That's an early memory for me. Probably messed me up for life.

Saddle Tramp said...

Octavio Paz said once that " A chained man need only shut his eyes to make the world explode "

So much of what we are fed today goes to great pains to avoid the mystery and the gamble, thus closing the window into the liberating world of poetry and art in all of it's forms of salvation. Truth has always been more accurately observed and revealed by the outsiders. All the more so by those drug through a crowd of pounding fists and denouncements by the repressive regimes that are the ones denouncing what is truly their own needed liberation.
The real artists are always riding that wild bronc , half-cocked or upside down coming so far for that short ride.
Tom, you took it up a notch on this one and rode the devil with one hand ...


saddle tramp
Via: TA Stopping Center in Albert Lea, MN camped out in a day full of rain

KY Warrior Librarian said...

Thank you for this tribute to Peter LaFarge...it really touched my heart.

tplottner said...

Tom Russell...as I read your blog I get a sense of prose and poetry in your thoughts.....you are amazing-----I have been listening to your ballads for years...without knowing who created them-----This music is in my soul....it touches a special spot.......some songs I am as one with them...they bring a big grin on my face.....only certain music has such power and persuasion--I love your music Tom-----nobody on this planet can tell a story/song the way you can--I am now obssessed with your song ROANIE---I have known alot of ROANIES----I hope to see you in person before I die and sing ROANIE