Folk singer‘s lost story finds renewed interest
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Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Bob Dylan called him an “unsung hero.” Johnny Cash recorded an entire album with his protest songs. D’Pharoah Woon-a-tai of “Reservation Dogs” raves about him.
But folk singer/songwriter Peter La Farge remained relatively unknown for decades after his early death in 1965 at age 34. Until recently.
After spending years as almost a footnote in music history — he was a songwriter whose hits were made by others, who never had a band or performed much beyond New York City — he began to gain recognition.
He and his work were featured in the 2017 film, “Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World,” and in a 2019 pseudo-documentary on Bob Dylan, “Rolling Thunder Review,” by filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns put him in the spotlight in 2019 as Cash’s partner in protest in “Country Music,” the exhaustive history of the genre that aired on PBS.
Now, a documentary film, “The Ballad of Peter La Farge,” that I directed and produced in 2006, has been picked up for streaming by Amazon Prime, along with a book and tribute CD I produced in 2012 that are now also available online through Amazon.
It’s a stunning resurgence, and long overdue.
“I remember when protest songwriting was really big,” Dylan wrote in his book, “Biograph,” released in 1983. “The guy who was best at that was Peter La Farge. He was a champion rodeo cowboy and sometime back he’d been a boxer. He had a lot of his bones broken. I think he’d also been shot up in Korea. Anyway he wrote “Ira Hayes,” “Iron Mountain,” “Johnny Half-Breed,” “White Girl,” and about a hundred other things. There was one about Custer, ‘the general, he don’t ride well anymore.’
“We were pretty tight for a while,” Dylan continued. “Peter is one of the unsung heroes of the day … When I think of a guitar poet or protest singer, I always think of Peter, but he was a love-song writer, too.”
Woon-a-tai spread the word more recently about La Farge in a 2022 appearance on the entertainment website, “The AV Club,” with Rez Dogs cast mates Paulina Alexis and Lane Factor, talking about their favorite music.
“Peter La Farge! Folk singer from the ‘60s … the first folk singer that signed to Columbia Records,” Woon-a-tai said. “You guys don't know? He was best friends with Johnny Cash … He was a big influence in the folk scene. Bob Dylan talks about him a lot. Dylan copied a lot of his sh*t. If you want to learn a history of folk, learn about Peter La Farge.”
An untold story
I had been covering Indigenous stories for a decade when Johnny Cash died In 2003, and the obits mentioned his “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian” album.
Looking into the 1964 record, I realized that the majority of songs were not written by Cash but by La Farge, who was Narragansett/French and adopted into the Hopi tribe. The album included the song, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” about the Pima Indian who raised the flag at Iwo Jima.
I had a personal connection, as my Cherokee Uncle Cecil Hale was in Hayes’ battalion and was killed in action on Iwo Jima. He was 22. There was not much information to be found on La Farge.
Fascinated by this untold story, I embarked on years of research tracking down his family, the remaining ‘60s folk singers, film clips, photos, original recordings, and more, with assistance from a BMI/Woody Guthrie Foundation fellowship.
Related stories:
—PBS ‘Country Music’: Native stories of Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn and Peter La Farge
—Award-winning film ‘Rumble’
This was before any of this was online, so I needed multiple trips around the country to libraries, archives, the La Farge family home in New Mexico, and, once, a hospital in Colorado to meet his only daughter, Karen Wanden La Farge, who had suffered brain damage from what appeared to have been a random assault in Colorado Springs.
In 2005, filmmaker Scorsese, whose latest film is “Killers of the Flower Moon,” cast a brief spotlight on La Farge in a documentary on Dylan, “No Direction Home.”
With all the information I had gathered, I directed and produced the 2006 documentary, “The Ballad of Peter La Farge,” which made the rounds of film festivals and was released on DVD.
In 2010, I was asked to contribute my archives and information on La Farge to a show at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian called “Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture,” in Washington, D.C. and then New York City.
The exhibition marked the first mainstream recognition of La Farge and his work since his death.
I followed up my documentary with a 2012 book, “Don’t Tell Me How I Looked Falling,” and produced a tribute CD, “Rare Breed,” that featured Cash, Hank Williams III, Sarah Lee Guthrie, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and more.
Then came the national spotlight. The 2017 feature film, “Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World,” based on the blockbuster exhibit at NMAI, included a segment on La Farge.
Folk singer/songwriter Peter La Farge, shown here in 1962, captured the attention of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash but faded into obscurity after his death in 1965 at age 34. La Farge, who was Narragansett/French and adopted into the Hopi tribe, wrote "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and other protest songs. (Photo by David Gahr, courtesy of the Hale Schulman archives)
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In 2019, Scorsese released a documentary of Dylan’s 1970s concert tour, “Rolling Thunder Review,” which featured Dylan crooning “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” to a room full of Iroquois on the Tuscarora Reservation.
Now, with the advances in streaming, Amazon moved my documentary in October 2023 to its Amazon Prime streaming site. The biography is also available again as an ebook through Amazon Kindle, and the CD is available to stream or download.
The recognition comes nearly 60 years after La Farge’s death of an overdose on Oct. 27, 1965, in New York City. Some suggested at the time it was a suicide, but his family is convinced it was accidental.
Taking the stage
La Farge was born in New York City in 1931 and grew up on a ranch in Colorado, carrying his family's intellectual traits. His father Oliver La Farge, Narragansett/French, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for “Laughing Boy,” a novel about the Navajo people. His mother, Wanden Matthews La Farge, was mayor of Fountain, Colorado.
He excelled at rodeo, and joined the U.S. Navy. After trying his hand at acting in the late 1950s, he hit Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, singing at coffeehouses and befriending fellow singers Buffy Sainte-Marie and Patrick Sky, Creek.
This still shot, taken from the film, "The Ballad of Peter La Farge," shows folk singer/songwriter La Farge, right, standing with Bob Dylan on stage at Carnegie Hall in the early 1960s. La Farge, who wrote the song, "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," slipped into obscurity after his death in 1965 at age 34, but he has drawn renewed interest in recent years. The 2006 film, written and directed by ICT contributor Sandra Hale Schulman, was picked up by Amazon Prime for its streaming services in October 2023. (Photo by David Gahr, courtesy of the Hale Schulman archives)
He got a record contract with Columbia in 1961, even before Dylan, then signed with Folkways. He had released six albums by 1965.
The stark, poetic, political nature of his songs caught Cash’s attention, and he recorded the “Bitter Tears’ album in 1964. It reached the Billboard charts, and he had a hit with “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”
“Peter was a genuine intellectual, but he was also very earthy, very proud of his (adopted) Hopi heritage, and very aware of the wrongs done to his people and other Native Americans,” Cash said in his autobiography, “Cash.”
“The history he knew so well wasn’t known at all by most white Americans in the early 1960s – though that would certainly change in the coming years – so to some extent, his was a voice crying in the wilderness,” Cash wrote. “I felt lucky to be hearing it. Peter was great. He wasn’t careful with the Thorazine though.”
But La Farge’s glory was short-lived due to mental issues and addiction. He drank heavily and was known to abuse Thorazine, a drug used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. After his death, his family closed down his legacy, not understanding its importance.
To their credit, the La Farge family, particularly his younger sister Povy La Farge Bigbee, was extremely receptive to the story I was working on in the early 2000s, inviting me to their ranch home in New Mexico and sharing stories and pictures, many never before made public.
I learned he had a relationship with a Danish singer, Inger Nielsen, in New York City, and they had a child, Karen, in 1964, just three months before he died. I had planned to record Karen singing one of her father’s songs in 2005 with musician Keith Secola, but she was assaulted just weeks before I got there.
I had a harrowing visit with Karen in the hospital, and found she had suffered brain damage and could no longer speak. Karen is still alive, though severely disabled.
Other family members shared information, however, and the real story gradually fell into place, of a mysterious folk cowboy who had only been in the Greenwich Village scene for less than five years before his death.
A ‘haunted’ life
My film drew top reviews when it was released, but it came close to being lost to history.
“’The Ballad of Peter La Farge’ reveals its protagonist as a complex, haunted writer of complex, haunted songs,’’ wrote Peter Cooper in The Tennessean in 2006, when the film screened at the Nashville Film Festival.
“Too often minimized merely as a contemporary of Bob Dylan and the writer of the Johnny Cash hit ‘Ira Hayes,’ the La Farge of this Kevin Welch-narrated short is a fascinating, mystery-shrouded bolt of creativity,” Cooper said. “Rare photos and original music abound in this one.”
Fred Dellar also praised the film in Mojo in October 2010.
"The son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning father once president of the Association of Indian Affairs, La Farge was an influential Greenwich Village performer," Dellar wrote. “Writer-director Sandra Hale Schulman has bundled up the only known footage, a discussion of his work involving Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash and June Carter, plus various performances of La Farge’s songs to deliver a well-researched portrait that’s as good a documentary as we’re ever likely to get."
Photos of La Farge continue to be discovered, including one discovered recently of him with Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger onstage, from the Columbia Records archives.
New Indigenous protest music about boarding schools and pipelines, by bands like Blackfire, can be traced back to his songs of the 1960s, and young actors such as Woon-a-tai are now introducing La Farge to millions of followers.
It’s a powerful story that continues to be told.
More info
The 2006 film, “The Ballad of Peter La Farge,” directed and produced by ICT contributor and columnist Sandra Hale Schulman, is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime. A biography of La Farge, “Don’t Tell Me How I Looked Falling,” by Schulman, published in 2012, is now also available as an ebook through Amazon Kindle. A 2010 tribute CD featuring Johnny Cash, Hank Williams III and others, is available again to stream or download via Amazon.
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