"Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)" is a song written by John D. Loudermilk. It was first recorded in 1959 by Marvin Rainwater and released as "The Pale Faced Indian". Rainwater's MGM release stayed unnoticed. The first hit version was a 1968 cover by Don Fardon, a former member of The Sorrows, that reached #20 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart and #3 on the UK Singles Chart.
In 1971 the Raiders recorded the song; singer Mark Lindsay's ancestors were of Cherokee blood. This recording was released on the Columbia Records label and became #1 on the U.S. chart on July 24. The RIAA gold certification followed on 30 June 1971, for selling over a million copies. It was later certified platinum for selling an additional million copies. Some have said that guitarist Freddy Weller sang lead on the song, but Lindsay (the Raiders' usual lead vocalist) was actually responsible for the lead vocal track as well as producing the recording, which was originally planned as a solo Mark Lindsay effort.
The UK punk band, 999, released a cover version on 14 November 1981 on the Albion Ion label, and it reached #51 in the UK chart. The song was later further covered by the Orlando Riva Sound.
A 1994 country song by Tim McGraw, "Indian Outlaw", ends with part of the main "Cherokee people" chorus from "Indian Reservation". The live version also uses the full chorus near the end of the song.
Read more about Indian Reservation (The Lament Of The Cherokee Reservation Indian): Historical Context, Music and Lyric Form, Chart Run
Famous quotes containing the words indian, reservation, lament and/or cherokee:
“We crossed a deep and wide bay which makes eastward north of Kineo, leaving an island on our left, and keeping to the eastern side of the lake. This way or that led to some Tomhegan or Socatarian stream, up which the Indian had hunted, and whither I longed to go. The last name, however, had a bogus sound, too much like sectarian for me, as if a missionary had tampered with it; but I knew that the Indians were very liberal. I think I should have inclined to the Tomhegan first.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Music is so much a part of their daily lives that if an Indian visits another reservation one of the first questions asked on his return is: “What new songs did you learn?””
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skins and furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)