For the past six years, ever since the mid-Sixties Folk boom, Buffy Sainte-Marie has come out with an album a year, mostly fine and mostly overlooked. This album parallels her previous efforts - it's full of some fine original songs, a few vibratingly succinct re-workings of material that lends itself to her approach (Leonard Cohen's "The Bells" and Neil Young's "Helpless") as well as a couple of tunes from foreign languages ("The Surfer" and "The Song Of the French Partisan"). But, unlike her earlier totally folk-based releases, she has producing assistance from the old surfing records King Jack Nitzsche as well as aid musically from the likes of Crazy Horse, Neil Young, Ry Cooder, Jesse Davis and Merry Clayton.

Buffy still dominates the music, however, with one of the most arresting and haunting voices on disc, weaving her way through such gems as her minor classics "Now You've Been Gone For A Long Time" and the understated "Soldier Blue." Not to overlook her piano-laced anger on "Moratorium," the tune that she sang at Moratorium demonstrations throughout the United States last year: "Corp'ral Thomas McCann, is a three year Marine/Someone told him he'd better join up/It would make him a man./He came home and to the park he went/And he sat down on a bench/And a dungaree girl told him he'd been a man all along/And he looked at the sign that she carried in her hand./It said 'Fuck the war and bring our brothers home'/And Corp'ral McCann he looks into her eyes/And I believe that he's begun to understand."

The use of Clayton, Cooder, Davis and company occurs on the title tune, "Sweet September Morning" and, most effectively, on Buffy's delicate, wavering revamping of "Helpless," that has even more of a forlorn, ghostly quality than the original. Similarly, Buffy's interpretation of Cohen's "The Bells" and Carole King's "Smack Water Jack" are rewarding –acerbic, abandoned and terse.

The folk days are gone and Buffy in a way is a ghost from its halcyon–but as poetess Denise Levertov has matured with her contact with the Amerika she is living in (evidenced in her recent New Directions collection "Relearning the Alphabet") so has Miss Sainte-Marie adjusted, as this album reflects. (RS 84)

GARY VON TERSCH