Influencer of Idols

I'm enjoying reading the biography of Marc Bolan by Mark Paytress. It's rather densely packed with facts and anecdotes as he recounts Mark Feld growing into Marc Bolan, along with analysis and speculation. There's lots of name-dropping of course, which is as I expected. But I didn't expect to see the name of Buffy Sainte-Marie in these pages.

He's still only 19 at the moment (I'm up to 1966) and about to join John's Children but he's already done some unsuccessful solo demos. One of his first demos was a song called, 'A Song for Soldiers' which is dismissed as a take on "... Donovan's song." This must refer to 'Universal Soldier' which is a Buffy song that Donovan covered.

Then, a few pages later, the author notes that Marc's voice changed and he developed a new style of singing, the style we know and love today. In his early years Marc imitated Cliff Richard and Bob Dylan, a sound I can't begin to imagine, but sometime in 1966 his voice changed. The author writes,

It was a remarkable transition with no obvious precedent... Comparisons have been made with Bessie Smith's blueswailing, though a more likely contemporary influence was Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Amer-indian folksinger whose dramatic and lachrymose vocal flutters would have reached Marc's ears during the mid-sixties.

I've never really thought of Buffy and Marc together. Buffy's voice is far stronger than Marc's but maybe Buffy's vibrato influenced Marc's warble? Something the book makes clear is that Marc wasn't reticent about 'borrowing' influences.

Not that it really matters. It's fascinating to see how Buffy pops up in all sorts of places. I wonder if she knows about this and whether she even knows who Marc was? Anyway, it's an excuse for another photo of Buffy.