Our Music
Our Music... Black Matter is Dog Soldier Press's first musical production. The remainder of our music products arrived when we acquired the inventory of our sister company High Star Productions, Inc when High Star was dissolved in June 2009.
Dog Soldier’s second music CD, Burton Jesperson’s Any Road mixed collection of occasionally irreverent, self-composed and cover Americana and folksy blues songs will have you smiling and tapping your toe after the first few bars of the opening title cut, then reach out and grab you with the second cut, James, which recounts Burton’s encounter with a down and out blues-playing, maraca-wearing guitarist on a California pier. Red Truck Wine will inspire you …. either to get up and dance, or to head straight to your favorite bottle shop for a taste of this fine beverage. LA Blues will leave you wondering why someone didn’t write this song before.
Produced by Don Richmond and recorded at Don’s Howlin’ Dog Studios in Alamosa, CO, Burton’s unique vocal style and Any Road’s sterling musicality is enhanced by contributions from Burton on lead acoustic guitar, Dick Morrison on base, Mark Bennett on drums, Mike Hearne on lead acoustic guitar, Don Conoscenti on tremolo electric guitar, Andy Byrd on organ, Jimmy Stadler on piano and electric guitar, Marty Grebb on organ, John Carey on harmonica, Mark Eagleheart on acoustic guitar, Jennifer Peterson on background vocals, Ezra Idlet on acoustic lead guitar, and last but obviously not least, the immensely gifted Don Richmond on pedal steel guitar, tremolo electric guitar, mandolin, accordion, banjo, bottleneck slide guitar, maracas, Weisshorn slide guitar, electric guitar, harmonica, dobro and background vocals. This an album you don’t want to miss.
The two collections of Lakota Sacred Songs, known individually as Songs To Learn By and Sung As In Ceremony, were produced by High Star to accompany Howard Bad Hand’s book Native American Healing, also available from Dog Soldier Press. In Songs to Learn By, Howard sings at a slower pace and special effort to clearly enunciate Lakota words to aid non-Lakota speakers in learning the music. In Sung As In Ceremony Howard and Tom Teegarden, accompanied by a hand drum, sing at the same pace and volume one might expect to hear in a real life Lakota Ceremony.
The Red Leaf Singers, composed primarily of older members of the Bad Hand family from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, were widely known for both their musicality and their rich repertoire of traditional Lakota music. Their Songs of the Warrior Volume 1 CD contains a cycle of the Lakota victory songs for which they were rightly well known.
The remaining albums feature the music of Red Leaf Takoja, whose members include younger Bad Hands as well as Tom Teegarden, Richard Archuleta, Butch Brown and other fine singers from New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Dakota, and who was one of the supergroups on the North American powwow circuit in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many Red Leaf Takoja songs, composed by group members, have timeless qualities that have ensured their continued performance on the powwow circuit to the current day. Their Live at Taos Blue Lake Powwow album is, we believe, one of the best selling powwow albums of all time judging by sales volume. We have it on good authority that as recently as 2009, Live at Taos merited the dubious distinction of being number 1 on the “Most Commonly Stolen” list on the contemporary powwow circuit.
