‘Witchi Tai To . . . ‘

 by whiteray

In 1969, as the folk-rock duo of Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley were travelling to gigs all over the American Midwest, they’d tune in late at night to the legendary underground radio program Beaker Street on KAAY from Little Rock, Arkansas. And it was on Beaker Street, according to the official Brewer & Shipley website, that the duo first heard the song “Witchi Tai To.” 

Among the members of the band Everything Is Everything was Jim Pepper, a saxophonist of Kaw and Creek heritage. As the Brewer & Shipley website puts it: “Pepper adapted the song ‘Witchi Tai To’ from an ancient peyote chant that he learned from his Native American grandfather. . . . The group’s producers encouraged Pepper to express his Native American heritage in his music, and helped him work out the arrangement and English translation.” 

The single, notes the Brewer & Shipley website on its page about the song, is “the only hit in the history of the Billboard pop charts (reaching No. 69 in 1969) to feature an authentic Native American chant.” (I don’t know when that statement went up on the website, which seems to be regularly updated, but it would not be surprising if the statement remains true.) 

Brewer & Shipley decided to cover the song, of course, and recorded it for their 1969 album, Weeds. And they got some of the words wrong. “The irony,” notes their website, “is that they got all the Native American lyrics right but misheard the adapted English lyrics.” They heard and sang: 

What a spirit spring
Is bringing round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I’m not dead 

But Pepper had written: 

Water spirit feelings
Springin’ round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I’m not dead 

No matter. Brewer & Shipley’s version got what the website calls “heavy FM airplay” and was perhaps the best-known version of the song, even getting mention in Jim Pepper’s obituary in the New York Times when the musician passed away in 1992. 

There were other covers of “Witchi Tai To,” of course. (Some of the offered the title as “Witchitai To,” others a “Witchi Tia To,” and there are likely more variants.) Jim Pepper did his own version of the tune on his 1971 album, Pepper’s Pow Wow. Other early covers came from a group calling itself Topo D Bil, which was actually Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Band along with some of his bandmates and other friends (1969); from the American group Harpers Bizarre on its 1969 album Harpers Bizarre 4; from the John Schroeder Orchestra, a British ensemble that – according to the notes at YouTube – got David Byron of Uriah Heep to handle the vocals (1971); from a New Zealand group named Tom Thumb (1969); from a group called Today’s Tomorrow (1970); and from French singer Robert Charlebois (1973). 

Additionally, a jazz group named Oregon took on the song twice, recording a short version on its 1974 album, Winter Light, and then taking the song for an eight-minute ride on Out Of The Woods in 1978. From then on, there’s a gap in my collection of covers of “Witchi Tai To” that goes to 1993, but I have no doubt that if I dug further, I’d find versions to fill those fifteen years. 

There are a few versions of the tune in my files on the other side of that eighteen-year gap: Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek did a nice version on his 1993 album Twelve Moons. And Pete Wyoming Bender, a musician of Native American descent who lived in Berlin, Germany, covered the song well on his 2005 album, Rainmaker. 

Sometimes, though, the later versions are disappointments. I sought out the 2004 CD Red Dragonfly by saxophonist/flautist Jane Bunnett for her cover of “Witchi Tia To,” and found it devolved into what sounds to me aimless wandering. (As Chuck Berry wrote about modern jazz more than sixty years ago, “they lose the beauty of the melody.”) And the 2007 version by X-Press 2, the title track of their Witchi Tai To album, sounded a little mechanical with the beats and the electronica. 

My favorite? Well, I can’t say today. I still love Brewer & Shipley’s version, which was no doubt the first version I heard (likely on freeform FM radio in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as it was familiar to me when I picked up their album Weeds in the late 1990s). And I like the original by Everything Is Everything. But one of the more arresting versions I’ve come across is one that showed up after the first cluster of covers from the years 1969-71. Singer/songwriter, producer and composer Rachel Faro included a reflective version of the song on her 1975 album, Rachel Faro II, and if it’s not my favorite, it’s definitely in the running.