It was Hackford’s friend Gary George, former PR chief of Warner Bros. Records, who suggested his client Jennifer Warnes to sing it; and it was Warnes who came up with the idea to make it a duet with Joe Cocker. “Jack and I weren’t invited to the recording session, but whatever they did in there was magic,” says Sainte-Marie, who notes that producer “Stewart Levine’s perfect arrangement became a towering but totally natural duet.
Paramount heads Michael Eisner and Don Simpson “hated the record and said it would never be a hit,” Hackford once said. But it spent 23 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, including three at No. 1. It also won a best original song Oscar in 1983, making Sainte-Marie the first Indigenous artist to win one.
“It’s pretty surreal to walk around Hollywood on Oscar night holding your own Academy Award while eating pizza,” she recalls. “It’s only been recently that anyone has mentioned that I was the first Indigenous Oscar winner. It took another 38 years for Taika Waititi — Maori from New Zealand — to win for. And recently Wes Studi, who is Cherokee, received an honorary Oscar for his great body of work.