PAUL KELLY A lullaby that laments climate inaction. WHY I WROTE THIS SONG Sleep, Australia, Sleep is a lament in the form of a lullaby. Paradoxically, it can also be heard as a wake up call – a critique of the widespread attitude amongst humans that we are the most important life form on the planet. I believe we’ve reached a tipping point now where this attitude is doing terrible harm to all life on earth. I hope the song doesn’t come true but some of it already has. I am concerned that activity and inactivity is proving perilous life on our planet. Through deforestation, development on wetlands, use of pesticides, introduced of foreign fauna and flora, man made climate change and other anthropocentric activities we are rapidly wiping out thousands of species of insects, birds and other creatures. And when little things go bigger things follow.
« Indian Sunset » was inspired by a visit lyricist Bernie Taupin made to a reservation. Narrated by an unnamed Native American, this emotive ballad which runs to 6 minutes 47 seconds, is about the end of a way of life as the colonization of the vast American continent by the White Man leads inevitably to the subjugation and near extinction of its former masters.
This song tells the story of Chief Noc-A-Homa, the former mascot for the Atlanta Braves baseball team (as in Chief « knock a homer »). Frontman Cole Alexander explained this ode to the drunken Native Indian in an interview with Spin magazine: « The guy who acted as the mascot was a real Native American and he used to do prayer dances on the pitcher’s mound. A lot of the other Native Americans were bummed out on him. Apparently he drank a lot and would pass out in this teepee that was part of his shtick. He was just a nice guy who rooted for the team. He eventually got fired for running around the field drunk. »
The song is about the plight of the Cherokee Indians, who in 1791 were displaced from their home in Georgia to a reservation in Oklahoma. Raiders frontman Mark Lindsay, whose ancestry was part Indian, thought that this would be a good song to record. (thanks, Bertrand – Paris, France)
The group was formerly known as Paul Revere and the Raiders. This song became not just their biggest hit, but the best-selling single for Columbia Records. Isn’t it ironic that a song like this, brimming with simmering rage and an implied threat to retake the land for the natives, was written by a white Country songwriter, recorded by a band named after the white European patriots whose colonization of the US took the land from the Cherokees in the first place, and sold by Columbia Records, a company originating as « Columbia Graphophone Company » in the UK?
About the European arrival to the « New World, » told from the perspective of both the oppressed Cree and the invading Anglo-Saxon soldiers. The first verse (« White man came across the sea, he brought us pain and misery ») is from the point of view of the Natives. The second verse (« Chasing the redskins back to their holes, fighting them at their own game ») is from the white man’s eyes, and the last verse (« Selling them whiskey and taking their gold, enslaving the young and destroying the old ») is an impartial third-person narration.
