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Until It's Time For You To Go (WORD)
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Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote this song after falling in love with someone who could not be with her. It because one of her most popular songs. According to Sainte-Marie's official site, the lyrics to the song are about "honesty and freedom inside the heart." Sainte-Marie told Magnet Magazine it's "not just about illicit love, but also about anybody you just can't have … like a soldier who's on the way to Vietnam or somebody who's dying or just plain unavailable to you in spite of the love. It's been recorded by more than 200 artists in 13 different languages, so I guess it’s a common experience." The song has been recorded by many others including Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey, Cher, Barbra Streisand, etc.
Buffy included a French-language reworking of the song, "T'es pas un autre", on her 1967 album Fire & Fleet & Candlelight. French translation was made by Quebec songwriter Claude Gauthier.
Sainte-Marie was born in 1941 on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada, to Cree parents. At age two or three she was taken from her parents as part of the Sixties Scoop - a government policy where Indigenous children were taken from their families, communities and cultures for placement in non-First Nations families. She was adopted by an American couple, Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, from Wakefield, Massachusetts. She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst earning degrees in teaching and Oriental philosophy and graduated as one of the top ten members of her class. She has won recognition, awards and honours for her music as well as her work in education and social activism. In 1983, she became the first Indigenous North American person to win an Oscar, when her song "Up Where We Belong", co-written for the film An Officer and a Gentleman, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 55th Academy Awards. The song also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song that same year. In 1997, she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans.