Robbie Robertson – Ghost Dance
1995
7.9K Likes
Best comments
1.“Everybody else: 'Oh yes, this music so good, love it.' Me, who's only here for a school assignment: ...”
More comments
- 2.“I sang a song with him a few months before he formed the Band. He always had a great voice, but here it shows a real jewel of work and love for his forefathers.”
- 3.“In a meditation some years ago, I met a family in the woods. This man opened the door, embraced me and told me the name of my people. I searched for three years and found nothing – did I make it up? Then one day I bought a new CD, Music for the Native Americans... and there it was: Shoshone!”
The story
After The Band, Robbie Robertson went solo, and in 1994 he went home in a different way. His mother was Mohawk, raised on the Six Nations Reservation in southern Ontario, where he spent summers as a kid learning that side of his family. Music for The Native Americans, made for TBS's three-part 1994 documentary series The Native Americans, was his first work inspired directly by that heritage. He recorded it with Native American and First Nations musicians, billed as the Red Road Ensemble. Ghost Dance, credited to Robertson and Jim Wilson, came out as a single in 1995 with this video.
The title comes from the Ghost Dance movement. On New Year's Day 1889, a Paiute man named Wovoka had a vision and began teaching a dance that was said to reunite the living with their dead. It spread across the Plains, and federal agents were alarmed by it. On December 29, 1890, soldiers opened fire at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota and killed hundreds of Lakota men, women and children. We couldn't find a source describing what's on screen, so we'll let the video speak for itself.
