Land grant college review

Donna the Buffalo. Rockin' in the Weary Land. Sugar Hill SHCD 3877. Also contact the band at PO Box 287, Trumansburg, NY 14886 or www.DonnatheBuffalo.com.

Americans love buffaloes. From buffalo nickels to Howdy Doody's Buffalo Bob, this great shaggy beast of the prairie has held a special place in our collective imagination. We have watched the amazing Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show and seen the Buffalo Gals come out to dance--tapping out buffaloes, of course! We know of buffalo chips, buffalo wings, even Buffalo Springfield. And now, not far from Buffalo, New York, still another great American Buffalo has sprung to life--this time to roam our musical culture, stomping near hypnotic dance rhythms as it wraps its swirling, hook-happy melodies around the unique lyrics of its two lead songwriters and singers, Tara Nevins and Jeb Puryear. Donna the Buffalo has arrived!

Donna (assumedly unrelated to Grant Lee--the California Buffalo) originally thought to call itself Palmer Cartney. Of course, that didn't fly. Then, from somewhere in the great unwashed wilderness of Ithaca, New York, came the suggestion of Dawn of the Buffalo. This, even for Ithaca, seemed way too pretentious, especially for a band of ex-fiddle players roaming the East Coast bar, college, and festival circuits in a sort-of-silver 1953 tour bus. Misheard through fits of late-night laughter, "Donna the Buffalo" seemed just about right--and it stuck. (Well, at least it was better than Tales of Brave Ulysses, or Corn L. Cayuga, either of which would, if nothing else, have referenced Ithaca. But then, would a band that pours their music so full of cajun, reggae, and zydeco want to reference Ithaca?)

As Tara Nevins sings in "Tides of Time": "Seemed like a big hayride started us out to find our way." And this hayride, from early on, has bumped down musical trails far removed from Ithaca. Nevins, for example, loves to visit rural Louisiana--towns like Houma and Eunice--to play with the locals and to soak up their cajun- and zydeco-tinged Mardi Gras celebrations.

As with the Grateful Dead, a band that offers some interesting parallels, the musical heritage of this group lies in fiddles, bluegrass, and old-time Appalachian dance tunes. From this base they have evolved, over two CDs of original material recorded and released by themselves, and now this nationally distributed and stellar Sugar Hill release, into a band that weaves electric guitar, accordion, Lowrey organ, and even synthesizer into their uniquely original sound. Donna now magnificently embraces country, rock, reggae, and zydeco, while never forgetting the swirling, rhythmically insistent fiddle sounds of their collective roots.

This has stood them in good stead. Like the Dead were, Donna is a communal dance band, garnering rave reviews at festivals ranging from the Bethlehem Musikfest (where they played with Peter Rowan and David Grisman) to stints with the Band, Los Lobos, and Beausoleil and, recently, appearances at Doc Watson's Merlefest in Wilksboro, North Carolina. It's seemingly impossible to hear Donna play and not get up and move to those infectious rhythms. As Nevins sings on "Faith to Believe": "Stand on your own two feet and dance with the hardest days of the world by your side."

In addition to earthy feel-good physicality, the band also offers a good deal to think about in their lyrics, from Puryear and Nevins's "Mr. King," written and recorded on Martin Luther King Day, in which they assure King (and Rosa Parks) that their dreams and courage live on in this generation's hearts ("We're never gonna give up the fight"), to Puryear and Dowd's "Conscious Evolution," in which the singer is "wounded in battle, lying in the weeds, immersed in contemplation of history's evil deeds."

And yet, as grim and gritty as are some of the scenes Donna paints, things are never hopeless. From the hypnotic grooves of Puryear's Lou Reed-like vocals to the rippling Sandy Denny feel of Nevins's nature-wrapped images, the band urges us to "take the good with the bad, but the best is the deepest and the richest." Even in the "rain that falls on Jive Street" Puryear finds "truth that forms on the rising steam," and Nevins advises in "All the Time" to "let the good and the love and the spirit that lifts set the groove to keep on pushing you through."

Ultimately, this "groove pushing you through" is perhaps the best way to describe the musical effect of Donna the Buffalo. What their music offers, in the end, is hope--leavened with a little humor and a lot of rhythm. As they sing: "Life is strange, life is good, life is all that it should be." One could do worse--far, far worse--in this life, than rock in the weary land with Donna the Buffalo.

George H. Lewis University of the Pacific