“Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)” – Single by Raiders from the album Indian Reservation
B-side: “Terry’s Tune”
Released: February 1971
Recorded: December 3, 1970
Label: Columbia
Songwriter: John D. Loudermilk
Producer: Mark Lindsay
Charted No.1 in US, No.2 in Canada
In 1970, Raiders singer Mark Lindsay was looking for new material for his solo career after scoring the hits “Arizona” and “Silver Bird”, when Columbia A&R head Jack Gold offered “Indian Reservation” to him. With the unavailability of his usual producer Jerry Fuller, Lindsay decided to produce the recording himself, with the backing of the Wrecking Crew session musicians, on December 3, 1970. Unsure of the song’s success, Lindsay decided to label as a Raiders’ single. The band’s keyboardist Paul Revere promoted the single on radio stations across the country. After four years without a Raiders Top 10 hit since “Him or Me – What’s It Gonna Be?”, “Indian Reservation” reached the top of the charts on July 24, becoming the first and only number one hit for the band.
The song is about the plight of the Cherokee Indians, who in 1838 were displaced from their home in Georgia to a reservation in Oklahoma. Raiders frontman Mark Lindsay, whose ancestry was part Native American, thought this would be a good song to record.
The first hit version of this song was recorded in 1968 by a British singer named Don Fardon, who took the song to #20 in the US and #3 in the UK. Raiders used more keyboards and modern production elements in their 1971 rendition, which reached #1 in the US in July that year.
When Casey Kasem, host of the popular radio show American Top 40, asked John D. Loudermilk about writing this song, Loudermilk embellished a story about meeting a Cherokee Indian named Bloody Bear Tooth who told him about the plight of his people. Kasem repeated the story on his show, giving the song an intriguing, but false, backstory.
The group was formerly known as Paul Revere and the Raiders. This song became not just their biggest hit, but the best-selling single for Columbia Records. Isn’t it ironic that a song like this, brimming with simmering rage and an implied threat to retake the land for the natives, was written by a white country songwriter, recorded by a band named after the white European patriots whose colonization of the US took the land from the Cherokees in the first place, and sold by Columbia Records, a company originating as “Columbia Graphophone Company” in the UK?
The last line of the song was prophetic. The Eastern and Western bands of the Cherokee Nation became one again on April 6, 1984 when the tribes officially reunited at the Red Clay Council Grounds (now a state park) outside Cleveland, Tennessee.
