Tuscarora Blues

Tribal elders told her of the ways that Indians were involved in the slave trade. Some were shipped off to the Caribbean as slaves themselves, they told her. Others were lumped together with blacks and enslaved in this country. Still others lived more or less undisturbed as "free persons of color,” though many of those individuals played important roles on the Underground Railroad, working to free the enslaved.

Pura Fé Crescioni steps onstage for her second set, still clad in a red dress and cowboy boots, with thick, dark hair flowing over her shoulders. She sits in the same chair, and with the same laid back temperament adjusts the microphone. But appearances aside, this set will not merely be a continuation of the first.

The first was a journey into the past, a musical review of the hymns sung by her Tuscarora Indian ancestors in Sampson County, North Carolina. Accompanied by Deer Clan Singers Mark Deese and David Locklear, Pura Fé intoned the wailing harmonies of her people, laying down the beat using traditional Indian rattles.

The second set will be rooted firmly in the present, with Pura Fé presenting a repertoire of original contemporary blues numbers. She will trade in her rattle for a slide guitar, which she plays in her lap, and shift effortlessly from the traditional vocals to a powerful blues voice that has drawn comparisons to that of Bonnie Raitt.

But while the two sets represent very distinct styles of music, they are not entirely unrelated. The rhythms are strikingly similar, and the harmonies that characterize the Tuscarora hymns reappear often in the blues.

To Pura Fé, they represent a natural progression. What was, and what has come to be.

Pura Fé is out to change the way we understand the blues.

Though her grandparents moved the family to New York City long before she was born, Pura Fé always had an interest in her family’s Indian heritage, and felt tied to their roots in the Southeast.

“I was the reminder,” she says. “I asked a lot of questions [about] where we are, who we are, where we come from.”

Classically trained as a musician, and performing from a very young age, she started off in rock bands before graduating to folk, jazz and blues. She sang with the Mercer Ellington Orchestra, just as her mother sang with the original Duke Ellington Orchestra. But as time wore on, she found herself drawn increasingly to Indian culture, and formed an a cappella trio, Ulali, that performed traditional music. With Ulali, she traveled the world, appearing on bills alongside the likes of Raitt, Jackson Browne, Sting and Ben Harper, and recording with Robbie Robertson and the Indigo Girls.

In the years to come she would have the chance to ask deeper questions than she had as a child. During the early 1990s, a cousin invited her to accompany him on a trip to North Carolina to explore the family’s roots. “We did a lot of homework and knocked on a lot of doors,” she explains. “We got to meet distant relatives, to get a grasp of what was not talked about.”

They talked a lot, and listened a lot. They rediscovered symbolic landmarks that had long been a part of family lore.

In 1996 Pura Fé moved to Robeson County, North Carolina, known for its high concentration of Indians. She stayed on for seven years, teaching traditional music and dance to Indian children as a volunteer. She came across stories and facts not widely discussed in standard history books. Tribal elders told her of the ways that Indians were involved in the slave trade. Some were shipped off to the Caribbean as slaves themselves, they told her. Others were lumped together with blacks and enslaved in this country. Still others lived more or less undisturbed as “free persons of color,” though many of those individuals played important roles on the Underground Railroad, working to free the enslaved.

Perhaps the most important lesson she took from those discussions, she says, was the idea that when looking back at history, the experiences of Native Americans, African Americans, and whites cannot be separated and understood in isolation from one another. History books talk about slavery and the Indian experience as if they took part in completely different time periods. They make it sound as if all the Indians were run off the land by settlers long before slavery even became an issue. But in the reality of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South, those people all coexisted.

“People like to look back and talk about all the different stories,” Pure Fé is fond of saying, “It’s not separate stories. It’s one story. We were all there together.”

Occasionally you will hear women’s-rigs activists invoking “herstory,” as opposed to history. What Pura Fé embraces is really a notion of “ourstory.”

She points out that blacks, whites, and Native Americans didn’t just lead parallel lives, their lives intersected. There was intermarriage—more than history books might suggest—but more importantly, there was also a sharing of cultural traditions. Pura Fé, whose father is Puerto Rican, is herself a product of this type of mixture, which she terms “the melt.”

In telling the story of the blues, historians and ethnomusicologists of the past century have focused largely on the African-American experience. Historical documentaries blend the jangle of the blues guitar and the harmony of gospel voices with black and white images of slaves hard at work in the fields, while a narrator explains how the rhythms are drawn from a distant tribal past, across the Atlantic in Africa. Today’s blues icons come largely from the African-American community, and while the genre is performed and appreciated by all races, it is inextricably linked by popular culture to black history.

But to Pura Fé, the blues always did sound very familiar.

She believes that blues music, rather than being purely African in nature, actually derives from a cultural melt, combining the tribal music of enslaved Africans with the tribal music of the Indians of the Southeast.

“What’s real obvious is the rhythm,” she says. “The shuffle, the stomp dance—that’s traditional music. You can hear it also in the scale. The scale in blues is the same scale in all Indian music of the Southeast.”

Tim Duffy, who as director of the Hillsborough, N.C.-based Music Maker Relief Foundation recorded and produced Pura Fé’s latest album, titled Follow Your Heart’s Desire, this spring, agrees. “This is eastern North Carolina, the incredible harmony music,” he says, gesturing towards a stereo playing Pura Fé’s disc. “It’s found now in the churches down east. That is what is preserved of the Indians down east, the incredible harmony.”

Reviewers often comment that her brand of blues is influenced by her native roots, but in a way, they are only telling a half truth. Because Pura Fé’s point is that all blues, not just her own, draw on American Indian traditions.

And in fact, many of the prominent black blues musicians over the years have been quick to acknowledge their own Indian heritage—Etta Baker, Charlie Patton, Scrapper Blackwell, Duke Ellington. While discussing Pura Fé’s struggle, Duffy can hardly go two minutes without mentioning a musician he either grew up listening to or has since worked with and reflexively following up with, “He’s part-Indian too.” Music styles are not genetic, but they do get passed along generation to generation.

Culture is a curious thing. You have to protect and preserve it. You can share it, but at some point you can lose hold and it’s gone.

And that appears to be what happened. As time wore on, racial segregation and legislation continued, and Indians were frequently lumped in with other non-whites. On the first U.S. census, they were included with free blacks in the “all other free persons” category—as distinguished from slaves and free whites. The census did not separate American Indians out until 1860, and that enumeration did not extend nationwide until 1890. Tribal affiliations were not asked until much later. At times, Native Americans were disenfranchised by state laws, and many chose to hide their true identity to avoid negative consequences. As in the black community, racial “passing” was not uncommon.

Later, when the government sought to right the wrongs of the past, it went about legally recognizing tribes so they could be granted aid for things like education and healthcare. But many of the tribes, including the Tuscaroras of North Carolina, have never been fully recognized. Dr. Stanley Knick, director of the Native American Resource Center at UNC Pembroke, estimates that there are 150 tribes nationwide, mainly in the South and Southeast, for which full federal recognition has not been granted.

To complicate matters, Tuscaroras come from the same ancestry as Lumbees, the North Carolina tribe that famously accepted a compromise with the government in 1965 that officially termed them “Indians” but denied them many of the benefits available to fully recognized tribes. Even today, Robeson County’s Lumbee Indian population is often referred to as “the tribe that intermarried with former slaves,” which in the eyes of many somehow makes them less authentic Indians.

This complicated history, Pura Fé says, has led to an erosion of the Tuscaroras’ and other tribes’ unique identities, not to mention the various African tribes enslaved and lumped forever more as “African Americans.”

Pura Fé s goal in all of this is clear: to restore pride to her people, to rekindle an appreciation for their culture. That is what she spent seven years in Robeson County doing—David Locklear, 23, who now sings lead harmony for the Deer Clan Singers, was one of the children Pura Fé worked with early on—and that is what she continues to do as she travels and performs.

“These kids don’t know who they are,” she says. “They don’t know their language, their history, or their landmarks. It’s awful and they should. That’s where we are as a people, struggling to figure out how to get it all back.”

Part of that is ensuring that their story is told. She is obsessed with documentaries that she believes paint an incomplete picture of the past. She punctuates interesting stories by asking why they have not been captured on television. “Archibald Monk, from the Isle of Skye [in Scotland], was a slave-owner in Sampson County who employed mainly Tuscaroran women as slaves. He taught them to speak Gaelic out of the Bible. Gaelic! Why isn’t that on television?”

Her songs, written over the course of many years—from her time in Robeson County and before—tell of her journey and the journey of her people. Titles include “Goin’ Home” and “Rise Up Tuscarora Nation.” When she performs “Della Blackman/Pick and Choose,” she explains to the audience that it was written for her grandmother’s aunt, who was killed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Over the course of her career, she has served as a cultural ambassador for her people to United Nations conferences and local elementary school classrooms alike. She has shared her findings with international blues festival audiences, offering them a taste of traditional music to go with the blues and letting them draw their own conclusions.

Bill Ferris, for one, is ready to listen. Ferris is a professor of history and associate director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South.

“It’s not widely accepted,” Ferris says of Pura Fé’s story, “because most people have never even considered it. Historically, we’ve focused on the blues as part of the black experience.” Those in the history and ethnomusicology fields, he adds, have largely left the study of American Indians to anthropologists, but people like Pura Fé are finally making scholars reexamine the truths they once understood.

“We are beginning to take a second look at who we are as Americans and what the blues is all about,” Ferris says. “Through voices like Pura Fé’s, we will deepen our understanding of the blues through its connections to Indian music.”

A deeper understanding is much needed, according to Duffy, who says the traditional “blues myth” has marginalized the contributions of not just Indians, but many others as well.

The story of the blues, as portrayed by numerous documentaries, including PBS’s epic seven-part series “The Blues,” produced by Martin Scorsese, typically begins in the Mississippi Delta, the crossroads, home to blues legends B.B. King and Robert Johnson. From there it travels up the river to Chicago, then on to London. After influencing British icons like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, it returns to the United States in the form of rock and roll.

This story makes for great drama, but, says Duffy, it virtually ignores the contributions of musicians from all over the South, or worse, pegs them as merely derivative.

“It was such a powerful myth,” says Duffy, “that when you tell people that the blues didn’t come from Mississippi, they look at you like you’re crazy.” But the blues didn’t just originate in the Delta, he explains. It sprouted simultaneously all over the South. Every region had its own characteristic sound. The blues in Virginia sounded different than the blues in Georgia. The piano blues took root in Dallas. As time passed, these styles were fused in different combinations by new artists drawing bits and pieces from their favorite musicians.

Duffy should know. He has studied the greats, and even played with a few of them. He has spent much of his professional life traveling the South in search of hidden talent. And he has been successful. The foundation counts among its flock nearly 100 artists.

To find Pura Fé, he didn’t have to go far. In fact, the two were introduced by Ferris, whose fall seminar on Southern music the singer had attended for two years running. Ferris thought Music Maker would be a good match for Pura Fé, and so far he has been correct. The foundation has given Pura Fé the opportunity to finally record the songs she had been working on for so long, and in return, has received a quality artist who will aid its never-ending quest to preserve and promote the blues.

Duffy smiles, remembering how it took Pura Fé a short two months to learn the slide guitar and adapt all of her songs, which were written mainly for voice and piano.

“You think you finally understand what the blues is,” Duffy says, “but it’s like air: you can’t touch it. People put out books: the story of the blues. They know the beginning, the middle and the end. But you can’t. You can’t know, because the story is constantly unfolding.”