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Track: Universal Soldier
Artist: Buffy Sainte-Marie
Album: It's My Way

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Name: Buffy Sainte-Marie
Spotify Genres: native american music, folk rock, folk
Followers: 111,483
Popularity:

39/100

Biography

Singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, pacifist, educator, social activist, and philanthropist, born February 20, 1941 in Stoneham, Mass. At times she has self-identified as Cree and stated she was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, to an indigenous family, but averred that her Canadian birth certificate from back then was lost or destroyed. She came under fire in late 2023 for allegedly manufacturing this indigenous background and hiding her Massachusetts birth to white parents of Italian ancestry, according to a CBC documentary that found her original 1941 U.S. birth certificate. Sainte-Marie’s Order of Canada appointment was terminated by an ordinance signed by Gov. Gen. Mary Simon on January 3, 2025; no reason was given for the termination. She came up in the Greenwich Village scene in New York in the 1960s and her music has generally been categorized as folk and traditional music (although she did record one mostly-country album in Nashville: "I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again".) She won an Oscar in the mid-1980s for co-writing the hit "Up Where We Belong" for the "Officer And A Gentleman" film soundtrack.

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Release: Buffy Sainte-Marie - The Universal Soldier
Year: 1972
Genres: Folk, World, & Country
Styles: Folk

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Source: MusicBrainz

LYRICS

He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of 31 and he's only 17
He's been a soldier for a thousand years
He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an athiest, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,
he's fighting for the USA,
and he's fighting for the Russians
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy
and fighting for the Reds
He says it's for the peace of all
He's the one who must decide
who's to live and who's to die
and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have
condemned him at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war
and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.