page_title: Blackfeet music
section_title: Singing
hierarchical_section_title: Blackfeet music / Instrumentation / Singing
caption_attribution_description: Blackfoot dancer, Alberta, Canada
context_page_description: Blackfoot music is the music of the Blackfoot people. Singing predominates and was accompanied only by percussion.
  Bruno Nettl proposes that Blackfoot music is an "emblem of the heroic and the difficult in Blackfoot life", with performance practices that strongly distinguish music from the rest of life. Singing is strongly distinguished from speech and many songs contain no words, and those with texts often describe important parts of myths in a succinct manner. Music is associated closely with warfare and most singing is done by men and much by community leaders. "The acquisition of songs as associated with difficult feats—learned in visions brought about through self-denial and torture, required to be learned quickly, sung with the expenditure of great energy, sung in a difficult vocal style—all of this puts songs in the category of the heroic and the difficult."
context_section_description: Singing consists mostly of vocables, though recordings and reports from the early 1900s and prior indicate there were a great deal more lyrics or vocal texts. Blackfoot people see the profusion of words in European American music and African American music as lessening the importance and meaning of both words and music; and the same for the manner of listening to such music, that is, for entertainment or enjoyment, often while doing other things: if someone needed to say so many words, why didn't they just talk (p. 69). Blackfoot music is not based on instruments or texts, and singing is not supposed to sound like talking (or imitate any other sound). Typically, songs which contain texts are short and not repetitive, such as: "It's a bad thing to be an old man", (Nettl, 1989, p. 73, 1951 recording of a Crazy Dog Society song) or the relatively lengthy, "Yonder woman, you must take me. I am powerful. Yonder woman, you must take me, you must hear me. Where I sit is powerful." (Nettl, 1989, p. 73, Wissler and Duvall 1909:85 sung by a rock to a woman in the buffalo-rock myth). Often when the text takes up most of the melody with fewer vocables the melodies are short. The vocables used, as in Plains Indian singing, are the consonants h, y, w, and vowels. They avoid n, c (ts) and other consonants. i and e tend slightly to be higher in pitch, a, o, and u lower (p. 71). (Nettl, 1989)
  Solo singing may have been more prominent, or the norm, in the past, but group singing has increased in prominence, with singing/drumming groups called "drums". Vocal blending is not required in ensemble singing. The leader may begin the head motive or phrase of a song, and then be repeated or "raised" by another singer, possibly the second singer (p. 149). In pan-Indian powwow terminology, stanzas to a song are often called "push-ups" (p. 150). (Nettl, 1989)
caption: Blackfoot dancer, Alberta 1973
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