Special to ICT
TULSA, Okla. – With Bob Dylan’s music making a come-back after last year’s biographical film “A Complete Unknown,” Native musician Joy Harjo seized the moment to shed light on the Indigenous veins of rock ‘n’ roll and blues with a Jesse Ed Davis tribute concert, “Red Dirt Boogie,” held Feb. 6.
Joy Harjo – Tulsa Native, Jazz musician, Muscogee poet, and artist-in-residence at the Bob Dylan Center – has many stories. One of her stories is meeting and recording music with Davis (Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Muscogee, Seminole) in the ’80s in Los Angeles, shortly before his death by overdose in 1988.
Davis was a guitarist from Norman, Oklahoma, who was on American Bandstand by the time he was 16.
“He (Davis) loved music,” said Harjo in an ICT interview. “He grew up in a very musical family, where he was trained both with traditional powwow music, but he also had piano musicians in his home, his parents, and they nurtured that musical spirit in him.”
Davis went on to play with big names like his friend John Lennon; The Rolling Stones, who he played with at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus in London; George Harrison from the Beatles, who he played with at Concert for Bangladesh; Eric Clapton; Billy Preston; and even Bob Dylan himself.
Davis’s music got another chance in the spotlight Feb. 6 at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.
Harjo is a Bollingen Prize (2023) and Poetry Society of America Frost Medal (2023) winner. Jackson Browne is a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame member and singer-songwriter. Taj Mahal is a Blues Hall of Fame member and four-time Grammy Award winner; his most recent being the 2025 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album for his 2024 album “Swingin’ Live at The Church in Tulsa.” All three of these music legends performed at the Feb. 6 tribute, and all three knew and played with Jesse Ed Davis during his lifetime.
Before the musicians took the stage, The Redstone Singers, a Kiowa family drum group, opened the night with a drum circle and traditional Kiowa singing. Members of the group who met Davis during his lifetime shared stories with the audience about how he was a “real Rock ‘n’ Roll star” with his “big, white, fur coat,” but that he was also just a part of the family, a Kiowa boy from Oklahoma with a guitar and a musical dream.
“It was so important that we include the Native community and a drum group to open the door for the show,” said Joy Harjo in an ICT interview. “It was important that the community and his own people were recognized.”
During the traditional singing, the audience of thousands, many of them Native, stood and removed their hats in reverence amid the celebratory yet somber atmosphere of welcoming Davis home to the Tulsa area.
“It does feel like he (Davis) is here, yes, he is family to us. We are Kiowa,” said Jack Anquoe, immediately after the drum circle, in an ICT interview. Jack and James Paul Anquoe were two of the traditional family singers on stage.
“We were raised traditional,” said James Paul Anquoe. “We’re powwow people. We’re dancers and singers. We’re crafts-people. We’re also in a blues-rock band. So we feel the same vibe as everyone tonight. We just decided to bring the traditional drum instead of our band.”
Harjo explained that part of a performance is the audience itself.
“I played recently with a full band in Wisconsin, and I bet there were probably four Natives in the audience, and it’s just different,” she said. “You can still do a good job and do your thing, but to have a crowd of over 2,000 and probably at least a half or two-third were Native, it is really cool.”
Harjo read a poem for Davis at the concert in which she repeated, “You made it home, made it home.”
“I went to look for you in a dream because that’s where you go to find the words and the music to carry on,” she said.
She performed this poem with a combination of song, spoken word and saxophone, while a guitarist accompanied her. She drew lines in her lyrics between the politics Natives endured in the ’60s and ’70s and current struggles of Indigenous people.
“That’s why we’re here tonight, Jesse, to be with you in the music,” she continued in spoken word. “And don’t we like to say that the world has changed since the takeover at Alcatraz, the Civil Rights Movement, and Native sovereignty? It hasn’t. We’re back at it in the same trickster tale, only now, the trickster is sitting in the seat of power, giving orders to destroy everything we work for, to tear it all down.”
Rock ‘n’ roll and blues have deep origins in Native culture and tribal music, according to drummer Douglas Proulx, producer of the documentary “Beyond Words,” which explores the Native origins of the “swing cadence” found in blues music.
“Blues is uniquely North American and attributed to Afro-Americans, ” said Proulx in the documentary. “But it wasn’t born from those roots alone.”
When asked in the documentary about Native origins of blues, Indigenous performing arts activist and producer Elaine Bomberry (Anishinabe and Cayuga) said that a good example would be “stomp dance and round dance songs. The heartbeat. It’s the drum beat. The heartbeat of Mother Earth. We (Natives) had a play in that.”
Harjo said she is working on a musical now that will show Muskogean peoples’ influence on blues and jazz. “Congo Square was a Muskogean village,” she said. Congo Square in New Orleans is famous for its influence on the history of African-American music, especially blues and jazz. “Sometimes I’ve been kind of pushed out of Native music,” Harjo continued in the interview. “They say, ‘Well, it’s not powwow, so it’s not Native,’ and yet, I always say if I’m playing saxophone, blues, jazz, I’m playing Native music.”
Sterlin Harjo (Seminole Nation), friend of Joy Harjo and producer of the hit comedy series “Reservation Dogs,” read a letter he wrote to Davis at the tribute performance. He said when he first heard Davis’ music he recognized in it a sense of immediacy.
“I recognize that urgency. It’s that biting, gnawing urgency underrepresented people feel when they have something inside them that needs to get out. I felt that. I’ve operated with that same urgency in my own work. ‘Reservation Dogs’ needed to get out,” he said.
Harjo also announced at the show that one of his next big projects, which started filming merely days before the tribute, is a documentary film about Davis, with more information on it soon to come.
Harjo said he receives criticism of his work for being either “too Native” or “not Native enough,” and that navigating his identity in the arts has been difficult, an experience that Joy Harjo said she relates to and could imagine Davis did as well.
“He (Davis) didn’t get his due while he was living,” she said. “I think it’s important to honor and recognize those people. He was brave. We called him a warrior with a guitar. He went out there and made music during a time that, well, it seems like it’s always that time for Natives, where we are battling and asserting our rights.
“And now we’re in another place, you know? We’re having to stand up against a state that wants to disappear Natives, and it’s the same thing with the new administration. It seems we’re in battle. Well, what happens when we get to this point? It’s the artists who are the messengers for what people are thinking, feeling, and wanting to say. It’s the artists who coalesce those feelings into words.”
Both Sterlin Harjo and Joy Harjo said Davis likely had to be a musician first, a man second, and Native last, despite his Nativeness being very important to him, because the threat of being pigeon-holed hung over his head – a threat that still lingers for Native artists today, they said.
“And if you notice, I was the only female up there, and that’s often the case, so I have to work twice as hard, and being Native too adds to the struggle,” said Joy Harjo. “Jesse didn’t lead with being Native. He led with ‘I’m a rockstar.’ There was once a Native category in the Grammys, and they would throw a lot of Native people out because they weren’t playing powwow. They weren’t sticking to even stereotypical ideas of what Native music is.”
Things have changed, but only to an extent, Joy Harjo said, since social media has brought more attention to Natives.
“It’s gotten better because of the internet and shows like ‘Reservation Dogs’ that highlight Natives in a big way, or people like Deb Halaand. It brings more awareness that we’re just out and about like everyone else.”
Joy Harjo’s idea for an exhibit at the Bob Dylan Center, “Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem,” opened last November and displays much of his work, his letters, and other aspects that add to his life story and legacy.
Author Douglas K. Miller also spoke at the event about his recent publication, “Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis,” which chronicles Davis’ rise from a Kiowa boy from Oklahoma to international fame in the ’60s and ’70s and delves into his contributions to rock ‘n’ roll history.
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