A partial history of "Red Indians" in popular music - unacceptable, but fun

When traditional Western movies and TV series began to die in the early 1960s, another class of cultural artefacts disappeared with them – the humorous, light-hearted pop song featuring Native American characters and/or a bastardised version of their traditional music. So politically incorrect did this sort of previously popular musical form become, I can’t even find a list of Native American-related (as opposed to “performed by”) singles online. So, in the interests of scholarship - and amusement - I’ll have to do the job myself.

I’m sure there are dozens – hundreds – of records I don’t know about, but the earliest one in my collection is “Red Wing”, written in 1905, about the love of the eponymous heroine for her absent brave. It’s been covered frequently, but I have a liking for Gordon Wayne’s rather ropey country/rockabilly version:

Mississippi band Hoyt “Floyd” Ming and His Pep-Steppers’ 1928 instrumental, “Indian War Whoop”, featured on Harry Smith’s 1950s Anthology of American Folk Music, and resurfaced on the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou.

Esther Casteel wrote “Rose of Cherokee”, a country number about the love between a cowboy and an Indian girl, in 1930, but the only version on YouTube is so dire, I can't bring myself to link to it.

“Indian Love Call” (“I am calling you oo-hoo-hoo-oo-hoo-hoo” etc.), from the 1936 Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddie vehicle, Rose Marie bears no relation whatsoever to Native American music, apart from featuring the word “Indian” in the title. Ditto jazz standards such as Charlie Barnet’s 1939 Big Band hit, “Cherokee”.

The next one in my collection is Hank Williams’s posthumous self-penned 1953 release, the excellent “Kaw-Liga” a tale of a Wooden Indian’s unrequited love for an Indian Maid “over in the antiques store”. It set the template for many a 1950 Native Indian-related recording – it starts with the familiar 4/4 tom-tom thud, with the emphasis on the first beat of the bar, it’s a love song, and the central figure is rather silly, but sympathetic, and it would now be considered grossly offensive:

Poor ol Kaw-liga, he never got a kiss,
Poor ol Kaw-liga, he don't know what he missed,
Is it any wonder that his face is red?
Kaw-liga, that poor ol' wooden head.

With the emergence of Rockabilly, which coincided with an explosion of cowboy shows on US TV, songs about Native Americans were suddenly everywhere. The era produced some absolute classics, the best of which was probably Johnny Horton’s classic “Cherokee Boogie”:

Carl Phillips’s obscure “Wigwam Willie” is another storming, rocking classic:

There were so many NA-related songs released across America at that time that Bear Family Records managed to release Wa-Chic-Ka-Nocka, a CD stuffed with 31 bopping wonders, none of which you will ever have heard of (track listing can be found here, and you can listen to 30” of each song, you lucky people). At least half the numbers are quite superb, but I’ll choose four favourites (in addition to some already mentioned above). First up is The Royal Knights’ moody instrumental, "Chief Whoopin Koff":



Then there’s Don Willis’s “Warrior Sam”, rendered almost incoherent by echo:

Next, The Impacts tell us all about the “Bobby Sox Squaw” (“Pocahontas was her Mama and Sitting Bull was her Pa”):

Finally, there’s Tommy Downs’s “Big Indian”, which isn’t that good, but makes up for it by being stupendously offensive:

In the late 1950s Marvin Rainwater, a half-Native American who toured Britain wearing Indian head-dress, released a number of sympathetic to the Red Man , including “Half Breed” and a version of John D. Loudermilk’s “Indian Reservation”.

But, despite Elvis Presley playing a mixed-race hero in 1960’s Flaming Star, the pop world wasn’t quite ready have its conscience tweaked, and, in that same year, Johnny Preston had a monster worldwide hit with the more traditional “Running Bear”:

I’m not sure it's significant, but 1960 was also the year The Shadows released their wonderful version of Jerry Lordan’s “Apache” (the Americans, for some odd reason, favoured a really crappy version by a Danish jazz guitarist!).

As far as I’m aware, light-hearted Indian-related pop music fell out of favour after that. Attitudes were changing. Hell, in 1964 John Ford even made Cheyenne Autumn, a rather unpleasant snooze-fest, which, he declared, was “an elegy to the Native American”. John Ford! (It flopped.)

The change in attitude was signalled by Coventry-born Don Fardon’s excellent – and far superior – remake of “Indian Reservation”, which was a deserved hit on both sides of the Atlantic. After that it was Buffy Sainte-Marie with “Soldier Blue” and Native American group, Redbone, and Marlon Brando sending up Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Oscar in 1973, and everyone and his sister recording concept albums which implied that Mom and Pop had perished at Wounded Knee.

As for the old-fashioned, unacceptable fun stuff, it sort of survived, thanks to the Incredible Bongo Band’s 1973 version of “Apache”, which has been described as Hip-Hop’s offical anthem.

I realise this is a very patchy and no doubt extremely inaccurate review of the field – if anyone would care to fill in the missing bits (non-PC fun stuff only), feel free.