She Used To Wanna Be A Ballerina
Released in 1971, She Used To Wanna Be A Ballerina is one of the more surprising entries in Buffy Sainte-Marie’s catalog — a rock-inflected record that found her covering Joni Mitchell and Neil Young while still centering her own singular perspective. It arrived during a particularly fertile period of experimentation, following the electronic landmark Illuminations and preceding the more country-leaning work of the mid-1970s.
Album Details
- Label: Vanguard (VMD 79311)
- Released: 1971
- Format: LP / CD reissue
Track Listing
- Rollin’ Mill Man
- Smack Water Jack
- Sweet September Morning
- She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina
- Bells
- Helpless
- Moratorium
- The Surfer Song
- Of the French Partisan
- Soldier Blue
- Now You’ve Been Gone for a Long Time
In Context
The title track captures something essential about Buffy Sainte-Marie’s perspective on ambition and identity — the person who wanted one thing and discovered she was something quite different, and better. "Helpless," a Neil Young cover, is given a reading that emphasizes its fragility. The album’s political consciousness — evident in "Moratorium" and "Soldier Blue," the latter a parallel release to her work on the film about the Sand Creek Massacre — was characteristic of her refusal to separate music from historical and social reality.
The Rolling Stone archive documents how this era of Buffy’s work was sometimes overlooked by critics focused on the male folksingers of the period, while her influence on those same singers was substantial. "Smack Water Jack" and several other tracks showed her facility with a rock band arrangement without sacrificing the lyrical seriousness that defined her work.
Legacy
As with much of Buffy’s Vanguard catalog, She Used To Wanna Be A Ballerina has aged well — better, perhaps, than many of its more celebrated contemporaries. Its combination of social urgency, folk grounding, and rock energy feels less dated than the era’s stadium rock. It deserves rediscovery.