She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina

Last updated
She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina
She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina.jpg
Studio album by
ReleasedMarch 1971
Genre Folk
Length35:25
Label Vanguard
Producer Jack Nitzsche, Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie chronology
Illuminations
(1969)
She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina
(1971)
Moonshot
(1972)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic Star full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar empty.svgStar empty.svg [1]
Rolling Stone (favourable) [2]

She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina is the seventh album by Buffy Sainte-Marie, released in 1971. [3]

Contents

Her previous album Illuminations having sold so poorly as to lose Vanguard a considerable sum of money, the label placed considerable pressure on Sainte-Marie to come up with something that would sell in larger numbers. To this effect, She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina was recorded with guitar from Jesse Ed Davis, Ry Cooder and Neil Young and assistance from the latter's backing band Crazy Horse. There was also a change in focus of the material: covers of contemporary songs, which she had almost never recorded before, accounted for five of the eleven songs. Vanguard boss Maynard Solomon, who had produced her first five albums and most of Illuminations, surrendered production duties completely to Neil Young producer Jack Nitzsche, who was later to marry Sainte-Marie after she wrote "Up Where We Belong" with him in the early 1980s.

This label-driven effort to achieve increased commercial success did briefly pay off when "Soldier Blue", the theme song from the 1970 movie of the same name reached number 7 in the UK Singles Chart and was a hit throughout Europe. It failed to chart in the States, however, and the album barely dented the Billboard Top 200, which served to strain the relationship between Sainte-Marie and Vanguard and paved the way for their split in 1973 after Quiet Places . Soldier Blue single received a silver disc award for 50,000 sales in Sweden. [4]

Track listing

All songs composed by Buffy Sainte-Marie except where noted.

  1. "Rollin' Mill Man" (Gerry Goffin, Russ Titelman) – 2:18
  2. "Smack Water Jack" (Gerry Goffin, Carole King) – 3:21
  3. "Sweet September Morning" – 2:53
  4. "She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina" – 2:17
  5. "Bells" – (Leonard Cohen) – 4:37
  6. "Helpless" (Neil Young) – 3:11
  7. "Moratorium" – 4:14
  8. "The Surfer" – (Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ariel Gonzales, Carlos Pardeiro) – 2:38
  9. "Song of the French Partisan" (Anna Marly, Hy Zaret) – 3:16
  10. "Soldier Blue" – 3:21
  11. "Now You've Been Gone for a Long Time" – 2:53

Personnel

Charts

Chart (1971)Peak
position
Australia (Kent Music Report) [5] 47
US Billboard 200 182

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ry Cooder</span> American musician

Ryland Peter Cooder is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloria Jones</span> American singer-songwriter

Gloria Richetta Jones is an American singer and songwriter who first found success in the United Kingdom, being recognized there as "The Queen of Northern Soul". She recorded the 1965 hit song "Tainted Love" and has worked in multiple genres as a Motown songwriter and recording artist, backing vocalist, and as a performer in musicals such as Hair. In the 1970s, she was a keyboardist and vocalist in Marc Bolan's glam rock band T. Rex. She and Bolan were also in a committed romantic relationship and had a son, Rolan Bolan, together.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Buffy Sainte-Marie</span> Canadian musician

Buffy Sainte-Marie, is an Indigenous Canadian-American singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. While working in these areas, her work has focused on issues facing Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. She has won recognition, awards and honours for her music as well as her work in education and social activism. Among her most popular songs are "Universal Soldier", "Cod'ine", "Until It's Time for You to Go", "Take My Hand for a While", "Now That the Buffalo's Gone", and her versions of Mickey Newbury's "Mister Can't You See" and Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game". Her songs have been recorded by many artists including Donovan, Joe Cocker, Jennifer Warnes, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, and Glen Campbell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerry Goffin</span> American lyricist (1939–2014)

Gerald Goffin was an American lyricist. Collaborating initially with his first wife, Carole King, he co-wrote many international pop hits of the early and mid-1960s, including the US No.1 hits "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", "Take Good Care of My Baby", "The Loco-Motion", and "Go Away Little Girl". It was later said of Goffin that his gift was "to find words that expressed what many young people were feeling but were unable to articulate."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crazy Horse (band)</span> American rock band

Crazy Horse is an American rock band best known for their association with Neil Young. Beginning in 1969 and continuing to the present day, they have been co-credited on a number of Young's albums, with 15 studio albums and numerous live albums being billed as by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. They have also released six studio albums of their own, issued between 1971 and 2009.

<i>Neil Young</i> (album) 1968 studio album by Neil Young

Neil Young is the debut studio album by Canadian / American musician Neil Young following his departure from Buffalo Springfield in 1968, issued on Reprise Records, catalogue number RS 6317. The album was first released on November 12th 1968 in the so-called 'CSG mix'. It was then partially remixed and re-released in late summer 1969, but at no time has the album ever charted on the Billboard 200.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Nitzsche</span> American musician, composer, arranger (1937–2000)

Bernard Alfred "Jack" Nitzsche was an American musician, arranger, songwriter, composer, and record producer. He first came to prominence in the early 1960s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector, and went on to work with the Rolling Stones and Neil Young, among others. He also worked extensively in film scores, notably for the films Performance, The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In 1983, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for co-writing "Up Where We Belong" with Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Russ Titelman is an American record producer and songwriter. He has to date won three Grammy Awards. He earned his first producing the Steve Winwood song "Higher Love", and his second and third for Eric Clapton's Journeyman and Unplugged albums, respectively. Titelman also produced Clapton's 24 Nights live album of 1990 and the all-blues album From the Cradle, released in 1994.

<i>Crazy Horse</i> (album) 1971 studio album by Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse is the debut album by Crazy Horse, released in 1971 by Reprise Records. It is the only album by the band to feature Danny Whitten recorded without Neil Young, and it peaked at #84 on the Billboard 200 album chart.

<i>The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972</i> 2009 box set by Neil Young

Neil Young Archives Vol. 1: 1963–1972 is the first in a planned series of box sets of archival material by Canadian-American musician Neil Young. It was released on June 2, 2009, in three different formats - a set of 10 Blu-ray discs in order to present high resolution audio as well as accompanying visual documentation, a set of 10 DVDs and a more basic 8-CD set. Covering Young's early years with The Squires and Buffalo Springfield, it also includes various demos, outtakes and alternate versions of songs from his albums Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest, as well as tracks he recorded with Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young during this time. Also included in the set are several live discs, as well as a copy of the long out-of-print film Journey Through the Past, directed by Young in the early 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Ducks</span> American rock band

The Ducks were a short-lived American rock group formed in the summer of 1977 by singer-songwriter Jeff Blackburn. The band included Bob Mosley, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, and Johnny Craviotto. The band played a series of impromptu bar gigs around the Santa Cruz area in 1977.

<i>Performance</i> (soundtrack) 1970 soundtrack album by various

Performance is a 1970 soundtrack album to the film Performance by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. It features music from Randy Newman, Merry Clayton, Ry Cooder, Jack Nitzsche, Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Last Poets and Mick Jagger.

<i>Im Gonna Be a Country Girl Again</i> Album by Buffy Sainte-Marie

I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again is the fifth album by Cree singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. As its title suggested, it saw her embrace Nashville country music with the help of session veterans such as the Jordanaires, Grady Martin, Roy M. Huskey, Jr. and Floyd Cramer. The album included re-recordings of "Now That the Buffalo's Gone" and "The Piney Wood Hills" from her first and second albums respectively. "Tall Trees in Georgia", in contrast to most of the material, showed Sainte-Marie performing in a style reminiscent of her earliest work.

<i>Illuminations</i> (Buffy Sainte-Marie album) 1969 studio album by Buffy Sainte-Marie

Illuminations is the sixth album by Indigenous Canadian-American singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, released in 1969 on Vanguard Records. From a foundation of vocals and acoustic guitar, Sainte-Marie and producer Maynard Solomon made pioneering use of the Buchla 100 synthesizer to create electronically treated vocals. It was the first quadraphonic vocal album released. The album's only single was "Better to Find Out for Yourself".

<i>Moonshot</i> (album) 1972 studio album by Buffy Sainte-Marie

Moonshot is a studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, released in 1972 by Vanguard Records.

<i>Quiet Places</i> 1973 studio album by Buffy Sainte-Marie

Quiet Places is Buffy Sainte-Marie's ninth album and her last for Vanguard Records, with whom she had had a very strained relationship ever since the financial disaster of the experimental Illuminations. In fact, her next album, Buffy, had already been recorded before Quiet Places was actually released and was not to find a label for many months after she had completely broken with Vanguard.

<i>The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie</i> 1970 greatest hits album by Buffy Sainte-Marie

The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie is a compilation album taken from her first six albums with Vanguard Records, released in 1970.

"Cod'ine" is a contemporary folk song by singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. Considered one of the earliest anti-drug songs, Sainte-Marie wrote the piece after becoming addicted to codeine which she had been given for a bronchial infection. She recorded it for her debut album, It's My Way! (1964).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Smackwater Jack (song)</span> 1971 single by Carole King

"Smackwater Jack" is a song written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. It was first released on King's 1971 album Tapestry and then on the second single from that album, along with "So Far Away", charting at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was subsequently covered by many artists, most famously by Quincy Jones as the title song of his 1971 album Smackwater Jack.

"The Circle Game" is a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell composed in 1966. One of her most-covered songs, it was originally recorded by Ian & Sylvia and Buffy Sainte-Marie in 1967, and by Tom Rush for his 1968 album of the same name. Mitchell recorded it for her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon; it also appears on her album Miles of Aisles.

References

  1. AllMusic review
  2. Rolling Stone review
  3. "Buffy Sainte-Marie – She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina". Billboard . Archived from the original on October 3, 2015. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  4. "Buffy Sainte Marie". Billboard. 27 November 1971. Retrieved 12 November 2018.
  5. Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrated ed.). St Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. p. 263. ISBN   0-646-11917-6.