Kevin Locke
The First Flute
1999 | Indigenous
— track 3: “Song of the White Buffalo Calf Maiden” (English translation)
Kevin Locke: [When I started playing the Indigenous North American flute] there were just a few practitioners. I was going to school at Black Hills State University. Then it was called Black Hills State College in Spearfish. And we went down to Vermillion, University of South Dakota, I believe that was in the fall of 1972, it was my freshman year in college. And there was a gentleman [Richard Fool Bull] there who I'd seen before, but never met. He was born in the 1870s. He was in his upper 90s, at this time, in 1972. But he was still very healthy, very dynamic — and he was one of the main practitioners of [this] tradition, or the genre of music — the songs originate as vocal compositions, and they're played on the flute. And so he was doing a presentation there at this big conference. [When] he finished his presentation, I waited until everybody left, I wanted to go over there and see — because he was such an artisan, the way he'd decorate, the way he'd embellish his instruments, they were really works of art, even besides sounding beautiful. And so then I went over there, and I was admiring his work, and then I wanted to get his ear, so I asked him if anybody was playing the flute or doing this. He said, "No! Nobody’s interested in this!" Then I said, "Well, what about your family? Maybe your kids or grandkids?" He said, "No, no, none of them are interested in this at all." And then I just kind of off-handedly, I said, "Oh, that's too bad. Seems like somebody should carry this on." And then he was doing something, he was putting stuff away, and he just put everything down, and he stopped and he was silent for a while, and he looked at me, and he says, "Yes!" He says, "You!" He says, "You can do it! You're the one that should do this."
I just kind of ignored it. I just brushed it aside. And I didn't really say anything, we didn't have any further conversation. But sometime after that, I heard that he had passed away. I was at my mom's place. And, you know, he used to make flutes and he'd sell beautiful flutes, he'd sell them for like $15, $20. Now they're worth thousands of dollars if people can get them. But my mom had a couple of his flutes. So she went back to her room, and she came back, and she brought one of them out. She handed it to me. And so I was trying to get some kind of sound out of it. And then I handed it back to her. She says, "No, no." She said, "No, you just keep that. You keep that."
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When I first started with the flute, I wanted to develop a repertoire. My mom did have these old recordings, from like the '30s. It was from the Library of Congress. And those selections on that recording, that Library of Congress recording, are like the main, best recordings of traditional flute music. And so I listened to those, those two songs, and those are my first two songs, you see? And then from there, I just found a lot of people around, older people, who knew those songs. Fortunately, when I started in the mid 1970s many of the older generation had a great knowledge of the unique vocal genre from which the flute melodies are derived. They'd sing them. There were no flute players when I started, but I knew how it was supposed to go because I'd been around Richard Fool Bull, that flute player — and there were others who died all about the same time. So I heard them. I knew how to take the vocal compositions, and to translate them on the flute.
Any of the singers at that time during the '70s, older generation singers, they all knew those songs. They're called love songs, but they're not all about love. They explore all the themes that you hear on popular music, or opera, or country western, whatever: people are broken-hearted, unrequited love, so many of them are about people who are romantically challenged. These kinds of songs. But they're very unique compositionally. They're much like haiku, because they follow a formula. It's a very strict compositional rule: So usually one phrase, very cryptic, they'll repeat it three times in the beginning of the song. Then the melody will change quite drastically, and the second part of the song, it'll shine a light and give meaning to the first cryptic part of the song. And the song ends with the repetition of that first cryptic opening. So they're very formulaic. So much so that you can easily identify those songs when you hear them. It's like a poetic form that — a literary form which is so unique, and really widespread throughout many regions in North America. That tradition so bespeaks the social life of the pre-reservation days — the rules of interaction — because at that time, years ago, I think young people, they could interact freely, but then when they reached probably puberty, then they separate them according to genders, because they have to go through their gender-specific training to acquire the subsistent skills. Because there's no joke living out in that area, like it goes down 30, 40 below in the winter. You gotta be sharp. You have to know what you're doing. So they have to learn those skills before they're eligible for marriage. But in the meantime, those social skills are not developed. So this genre of music became the medium through which they express themselves, you see? So even in the early reservation times, there was so many songs in that genre, they just continued on.
The rules of composition are defused throughout a wide region. So all the Great Lakes people, they have the same compositional rules for that genre. Even down to Oklahoma. And the flutes that they make are in the — it's kind of like a step off of a diatonic scale. So you can get Kiowa flutes, Comanche flutes from Ponca, from Oklahoma, and they'd be on the same scale as like Menominee, Ojibwa, or Meskwaki or Ho-Chunk, from the Great Lakes. So they could all play the songs on flutes crafted in these very different widespread areas.
The current popularized “Native American flute” was invented in 1980 for commercial purposes, it uses the well-known minor pentatonic scale and lends itself to improvisation. I differentiate that from the original Indigenous North American flute, which is much more versatile and has a wider range of notes and is perfectly adapted to play not only chromatic, diatonic and pentatonic scales, but its note progression is able to capture the authentic Indigenous North American musical aesthetic.
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Simultaneous with acquiring flute music, I also received the gift of the hoop dance, and learned that it is a choreographed prayer which invokes unity, beauty, holiness and is used to draw the people into this timeless, placeless realm. In 1980, my buddy [Arlo Goodbear], who was really, I think, the best hoop dancer on the planet at that time, we were doing some shows at Liberty Park [at the Statue of Liberty in New York City]. So he said, "Brother," he says, "This hoop dance that I have here," he says, "I'm going to give this dance to you." He was a joker, he liked to tease, so I thought he was just setting me up for a joke now. But I looked at him, and he said, "I'm serious. No! I'm going to give you four lessons," he said. "I'm going to give you one lesson now, and I'll give you the rest later." He said, "I'm gonna do my part, and you do your part." And he says, "When you do your part," he says, "Through this dance, you're gonna meet many people, see many places, have many wonderful experiences, and receive just abundant blessings." He said, "You'll get all that, if you do your part," he said, "But I'll do my part." He just had his hoops there, and he broke them out, and he just showed me a few designs. Maybe it took ten minutes at the most. And he had me repeat them.
The next day, we took off back out West. Not too many days after that, then, I got a call from his family. They told me that he had died. And that they wanted me to be one of the pall bearers. So then I did that. And interestingly, his brother gave me his hoops that he used. Just gave them to me, you know? I didn't ask why. He just came over and handed them to me when I was at the funeral.
Shortly after that, I had a series of dreams. Basically what I saw in these dreams was that I'd see him dancing. I'll give an example: I could see him dancing. It was dark. But then I'd hear the music, and I could see him dancing. And there was a little bit of light there, I could see him. And as he would dance, he began to create designs. And when he'd make the designs, the light would come out. That light would expand, and I could see the people gathered all around there, but they were all just so downcast, so downtrodden, so sad, and so heartbroken, you could see the way they carried themselves. It was like that. But then when he began to create designs with the hoop — the hoop, of course, is a universal archetype, it represents all good things, peace and unity, harmony, balance, beauty, continuity, eternity. Everything good is conveyed by the symbology of the hoop. So when he began to dance with that, he began to create designs, like designs of springtime. Like flowers, trees, birds, butterflies, animals, stars, everything, see? Then when he'd make a design, like flowers, then I could see in the people, the capacity that we all have to blossom, you see? To bring forth color, to bring beauty, to bring blessing. Now there was no language that I was hearing, it was images. It was visualizations that I could see in my dreams. And so then, after a series of dreams that I had, they ended like that. Then I recalled what he said — that he would continue the lessons, he'd give me four lessons. And then I realized he did his part. [laughs] He did his part. Now it was up to me.
But then, so I didn't know what to do. And then interestingly, he had obligated himself to go on this eight-week USI — it's a State Department tour, U.S. Information Service tour to Africa. So then, after he died they asked his mother if she could recommend somebody to go in her son's place. So then she said, "Well, take my other son." She meant me. It's just the way they are, the elders are. She says, "Take my other son, he can do it." And so then they asked me. But I knew I couldn't take his place, because I didn't know what to do. I said, "Well, okay, I'll try. I'll try to take his place." That was all I could say. I couldn't say I could do it, I didn't want to say I couldn't do it. So anyway, I went on that tour, and the first place we went was to Dakar. And so the rest of the group, they gave them a little decompression time for jetlag — but I practiced, practiced, practiced. You know what? The dreams that he gave me, they were not instructional. They weren't recipes how to do the dance. They just told me the meaning behind it, see? And that's all I got out of that. The patterns? Yeah, I could see those. The storyline? I got that. So that's what I was trying to replicate. But then we were doing two, three presentations per day for two months. I'm sure at the beginning, I was just awful. But then after a few days, I started to get a little pattern going, and I started to add on, add on. And so after about a few months, I started to have a nice little routine going. So I just kept on adding on to that, see? So that was really fortuitous that I started over there. And I'm sure it was all part of some big plan going on that I wasn't aware of. But everything he did predict, it came to pass. Since that time, 40 years ago now, really, I've been able to tour and perform in, I think it's nearly 100 countries.
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[The First Flute won] “Best Traditional Recording” at the 2000 Native American Music Awards. [The songs are] interpretations of wax cylinder recordings of Lakota singers made by ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore in Fort Yates, North Dakota between 1911 and 1914. This album has been described as “the ultimate presentation of American Indian flute, heard as it first was among the birds, wind, and waters of the Dakotas.” [It was] recorded outdoors at Sitting Bull’s camp on the Standing Rock Lakota Reservation.
I’m from Wakpala, South Dakota. It’s one of the eight districts, or communities, on the Standing Rock Reservation. [As a young adult] I was enlisted in Teacher Corp, which was one of the Great Society programs. It was to develop teachers from local community to work on the reservation areas. And I found that I was very poor in classroom management, and I'm still that way. I'm a very poor disciplinarian. Very lax in that regard. So then, what I found, the way I would engage the kids is I'd get them involved in different music and dance. Around 1979, the South Dakota Arts Council, they didn't have any tribal people on their artist roster to offer programs for the schools. So they approached me and asked me if I could do some presentations. And I said, "Yeah!" So I officially became part of the roster of the South Dakota Arts Council. I was initially a full-time teacher, and then I became a school administrator. Since about '84, it just got to the point where I’ve just been doing full-time freelancing. Self-employed, but doing a lot of school programs. Probably about 90%, 95% of what I do is school presentations, educational presentations. My aim as an artist who reaches a primarily younger, school age, audience is to encourage and inspire this younger generation to a global vision in which they see themselves as integral and active participants.
Indigenous North American tradition lacks the concept of arts as entertainment. In the dominant culture, music and dance are what I would maybe say are superfluous activities. They're extraneous. They're not intrinsic activities. Whereas, in most Indigenous cultures throughout the world, music and dance are obligatory activities. You have to participate. And so that's the difference right there. And in many cases, for indigenous cultures that I've observed, the use of music and dance is quite different. Because [today], you drive around, you watch people, they're plugged into their little earphones and they're in their cars, and they're just zoned out. They have stressful, routine lives! And they want to just escape all that. So they tune into music to kind of give them a release, and they just escape that reality that they're in, you see? Whereas, I find that Indigenous people, especially here in North America, they use music for the opposite purpose. We use it to connect with that which is real and good. That which is holy. That which enables all these barriers to collapse, and to dissipate the barrier between ourselves and our ancestors. That disappears through music. There's a continuity there. The barrier between ourselves and the future, that all disappears. The disconnect between ourselves and nature, we reverse that, and we connect through music and dance.
Every people and culture has folk arts, expressions that have been passed down intergenerational and over time [which] portray universal human values of beauty, balance, symmetry, unity. I have found that folk arts have universal validity and appreciation that transcend the vortex of pop culture. It is as if our ancestors are calling out to us and enabling us to offer these gifts as contributions to an emerging global civilization. I aspire to present the authentic North American artistic traditions used to connect humankind to the natural world, to meld the physical and secular to the sacred and eternal, to bridge the perceived gap that separates the generations, to bring all people into the hoop of life.
SOURCES
Locke, Kevin. “Bio: Kevin Locke, Med.” Wilmette Institute, 12 May 2020, wilmetteinstitute.org/faculty/kevin-locke/.
Oyinlola, Alero. “The World of Light: Kevin Locke and Madison Mullen.” Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, 29 June 2018, berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/series/faith-and-identity/podcasts/the-world-of-light-kevin-locke-and-madison-mullen.
Paraíso, Raquel. “Interview with Kevin Locke, Wakpala, South Dakota.” Media Collections Online, 18 Sept. 2020, media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/tq57p807s.
Reed, Jo. “Kevin Locke: 1990 NEA National Heritage Fellow.” National Endowment for the Arts, 2015, www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/kevin-locke.
