Biography
For those unfamiliar with his background, Peter La Farge might register only as a passing reference in accounts of Bob Dylan’s life or Johnny Cash’s discography. Nevertheless, throughout the opening and middle years of the 1960s he secured a distinctive position in the folk landscape of the period, becoming the earliest politically engaged Native American performer to draw sustained critical notice. Although he died before reaching the age of 34, La Farge produced an essential and singular addition to the folk revival that flourished in the early 1960s.
La Farge traced his ancestry to the Nargaset Indian tribe, which had effectively disappeared by the close of the nineteenth century. He and his sister grew up under the care of Tewa families on the Hopi reservation that borders Santa Fe, New Mexico. Much of his boyhood unfolded on a neighboring ranch; around the age of nine he was adopted by the writer Oliver La Farge, whose 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Laughing Child explored Navajo life. Father and son shared a deep interest in Native American traditions and heritage, and they later appeared jointly at a New York City presentation of the Hopi Eagle dance. By fourteen La Farge hosted his own radio program in Colorado Springs; by sixteen he was riding in rodeo competitions and performing as a vocalist. In that latter role he crossed paths with figures such as Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy. Cisco Houston later served as his mentor, instructing him in the craft of songwriting and guiding him toward a renewed sense of purpose.
During the Korean War, La Farge served in the United States Navy and received five battle stars, yet he ultimately viewed the conflict as a needless sacrifice of life. In the mid-1950s he returned to rodeo work and also boxed as an amateur. A 1956 rodeo mishap threatened the loss of a leg; during his lengthy recovery he turned to acting. After training at Chicago’s Goodman School of Theater, he traveled to New York with the cast of the play Darkness of the Moon. At roughly the same moment he began to devote greater energy to music, particularly songwriting, and gravitated toward the folk circles of Greenwich Village.
There he mingled with the young Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Dave Van Ronk, and the veteran protest singer Pete Seeger. As a Native American in the heart of lower Manhattan’s beat culture, La Farge stood out, and his compositions were valued for their verbal force and social message. He also maintained a steadier perspective on the surrounding excesses; according to several recollections, he acted at times as an informal protector for the youthful Dylan, steering him away from excessive risk, especially involving drugs.
Columbia Records signed him around the period when Dylan was contributing as a session musician to Carolyn Hester’s recordings, but the association proved brief and yielded only one commercially unsuccessful album. La Farge’s Greenwich Village appearances nevertheless persuaded Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, of his potential, prompting an immediate offer to document his work. The outcome was five albums issued between 1962 and 1965, each centered on Native American subjects.
While La Farge was recording for Folkways, Johnny Cash encountered “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” one of La Farge’s most deeply felt compositions, and later witnessed him perform in New York. The song recounted the true experiences of a Native American who earned distinction as a marine at Iwo Jima yet encountered only hardship, sorrow, and discrimination upon returning to civilian life. Cash and La Farge met in Nashville, after which the country artist recorded the full album Bitter Tears, addressing the condition of Native Americans in the United States and featuring six of La Farge’s songs. Cash’s single of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” climbed to number three on the country charts, even though numerous country disc jockeys declined to broadcast the serious, politically charged track; Cash further promoted the piece with a 1964 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival.
La Farge welcomed the visibility his work gained through Cash’s recordings, yet he refused to soften the grave, uncompromising tone of his material. As a result he attracted growing criticism within the folk community and dismissive commentary from reviewers. The substantial songwriting royalties generated by the Cash single and album intensified the envy of fellow musicians on the scene, an animosity compounded by La Farge’s decision not to capitalize further on the commercial breakthrough.
His standing was not aided by his unwillingness to modify his musical approach to match evolving audience preferences. In 1964, just as in 1960, he delivered songs in an almost unvarying monotone, frequently off pitch and spanning little more than half an octave. Such a style had been embraced by the folk underground of Greenwich Village in 1961, yet by 1964 Bob Dylan was beginning to record with a full band, and by 1965 even Phil Ochs—the most outspokenly uncompromising voice on the Village folk circuit, whose songs matched La Farge’s in anger and bite—recognized the necessity of refining his vocal and instrumental delivery to reach broader listeners.
La Farge persisted with his austere, nearly minimalist presentation: a lone guitar, a handful of elementary chords, and an abiding anger directed at a topic that most folk enthusiasts, let alone the wider public, barely professed to comprehend. Ochs, by comparison, channeled comparable outrage into topics—civil rights, American intervention abroad, Vietnam—that dominated daily headlines, and even he saw the value in enhancing his sound. La Farge contemplated abandoning folk music altogether rather than endure ongoing hostility from peers and critics.
In a final irony, La Farge, like Ochs, died prematurely, though not after a protracted decline. His last year in fact appeared as promising as any he had known. He established himself as a painter, married Danish singer Inger Nielsen (who later released an album of his songs), and the couple had a daughter. Following Cash’s success with his material, major labels once again expressed interest; in the fall of 1965 he was signed to MGM Records as a country artist and began planning an album.
He nevertheless suffered from undisclosed but serious health issues and had been under a physician’s care for an extended period. On October 27, 1965, La Farge was discovered dead in his New York apartment. The official cause was recorded as an apparent stroke, though some acquaintances suspected suicide. Far better known within the folk community than to the general public, he was eulogized by the Black activist and author Julius Lester as “the best of the whole lot.”
La Farge’s legacy has remained somewhat marginal, in part because he addressed concerns that did not enter mainstream awareness until roughly a decade after his death. Only after the efforts of political figures such as Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma and, later, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado; after events including the siege at Wounded Knee and accounts of contemporary mistreatment of Native Americans in the plains and western states; and after the release of major films—from Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, both of which treated the Sand Creek Massacre that La Farge had depicted powerfully in song, to Dances with Wolves—did public attention begin to align with the themes he had long explored. His Folkways recordings continue to be available through the Smithsonian Institution, which acquired the label’s catalog after Asch’s death, and through Bear Family Records, which has also reissued the material. His original Columbia album, however, remains out of print and hard to obtain.
La Farge traced his ancestry to the Nargaset Indian tribe, which had effectively disappeared by the close of the nineteenth century. He and his sister grew up under the care of Tewa families on the Hopi reservation that borders Santa Fe, New Mexico. Much of his boyhood unfolded on a neighboring ranch; around the age of nine he was adopted by the writer Oliver La Farge, whose 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Laughing Child explored Navajo life. Father and son shared a deep interest in Native American traditions and heritage, and they later appeared jointly at a New York City presentation of the Hopi Eagle dance. By fourteen La Farge hosted his own radio program in Colorado Springs; by sixteen he was riding in rodeo competitions and performing as a vocalist. In that latter role he crossed paths with figures such as Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy. Cisco Houston later served as his mentor, instructing him in the craft of songwriting and guiding him toward a renewed sense of purpose.
During the Korean War, La Farge served in the United States Navy and received five battle stars, yet he ultimately viewed the conflict as a needless sacrifice of life. In the mid-1950s he returned to rodeo work and also boxed as an amateur. A 1956 rodeo mishap threatened the loss of a leg; during his lengthy recovery he turned to acting. After training at Chicago’s Goodman School of Theater, he traveled to New York with the cast of the play Darkness of the Moon. At roughly the same moment he began to devote greater energy to music, particularly songwriting, and gravitated toward the folk circles of Greenwich Village.
There he mingled with the young Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Dave Van Ronk, and the veteran protest singer Pete Seeger. As a Native American in the heart of lower Manhattan’s beat culture, La Farge stood out, and his compositions were valued for their verbal force and social message. He also maintained a steadier perspective on the surrounding excesses; according to several recollections, he acted at times as an informal protector for the youthful Dylan, steering him away from excessive risk, especially involving drugs.
Columbia Records signed him around the period when Dylan was contributing as a session musician to Carolyn Hester’s recordings, but the association proved brief and yielded only one commercially unsuccessful album. La Farge’s Greenwich Village appearances nevertheless persuaded Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, of his potential, prompting an immediate offer to document his work. The outcome was five albums issued between 1962 and 1965, each centered on Native American subjects.
While La Farge was recording for Folkways, Johnny Cash encountered “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” one of La Farge’s most deeply felt compositions, and later witnessed him perform in New York. The song recounted the true experiences of a Native American who earned distinction as a marine at Iwo Jima yet encountered only hardship, sorrow, and discrimination upon returning to civilian life. Cash and La Farge met in Nashville, after which the country artist recorded the full album Bitter Tears, addressing the condition of Native Americans in the United States and featuring six of La Farge’s songs. Cash’s single of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” climbed to number three on the country charts, even though numerous country disc jockeys declined to broadcast the serious, politically charged track; Cash further promoted the piece with a 1964 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival.
La Farge welcomed the visibility his work gained through Cash’s recordings, yet he refused to soften the grave, uncompromising tone of his material. As a result he attracted growing criticism within the folk community and dismissive commentary from reviewers. The substantial songwriting royalties generated by the Cash single and album intensified the envy of fellow musicians on the scene, an animosity compounded by La Farge’s decision not to capitalize further on the commercial breakthrough.
His standing was not aided by his unwillingness to modify his musical approach to match evolving audience preferences. In 1964, just as in 1960, he delivered songs in an almost unvarying monotone, frequently off pitch and spanning little more than half an octave. Such a style had been embraced by the folk underground of Greenwich Village in 1961, yet by 1964 Bob Dylan was beginning to record with a full band, and by 1965 even Phil Ochs—the most outspokenly uncompromising voice on the Village folk circuit, whose songs matched La Farge’s in anger and bite—recognized the necessity of refining his vocal and instrumental delivery to reach broader listeners.
La Farge persisted with his austere, nearly minimalist presentation: a lone guitar, a handful of elementary chords, and an abiding anger directed at a topic that most folk enthusiasts, let alone the wider public, barely professed to comprehend. Ochs, by comparison, channeled comparable outrage into topics—civil rights, American intervention abroad, Vietnam—that dominated daily headlines, and even he saw the value in enhancing his sound. La Farge contemplated abandoning folk music altogether rather than endure ongoing hostility from peers and critics.
In a final irony, La Farge, like Ochs, died prematurely, though not after a protracted decline. His last year in fact appeared as promising as any he had known. He established himself as a painter, married Danish singer Inger Nielsen (who later released an album of his songs), and the couple had a daughter. Following Cash’s success with his material, major labels once again expressed interest; in the fall of 1965 he was signed to MGM Records as a country artist and began planning an album.
He nevertheless suffered from undisclosed but serious health issues and had been under a physician’s care for an extended period. On October 27, 1965, La Farge was discovered dead in his New York apartment. The official cause was recorded as an apparent stroke, though some acquaintances suspected suicide. Far better known within the folk community than to the general public, he was eulogized by the Black activist and author Julius Lester as “the best of the whole lot.”
La Farge’s legacy has remained somewhat marginal, in part because he addressed concerns that did not enter mainstream awareness until roughly a decade after his death. Only after the efforts of political figures such as Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma and, later, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado; after events including the siege at Wounded Knee and accounts of contemporary mistreatment of Native Americans in the plains and western states; and after the release of major films—from Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, both of which treated the Sand Creek Massacre that La Farge had depicted powerfully in song, to Dances with Wolves—did public attention begin to align with the themes he had long explored. His Folkways recordings continue to be available through the Smithsonian Institution, which acquired the label’s catalog after Asch’s death, and through Bear Family Records, which has also reissued the material. His original Columbia album, however, remains out of print and hard to obtain.
Albums
