Customer Reviews

She Used to Wanna Be a Ballarina

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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Buffy is often forgotten among the group of female singers, like Joan Baez and Judy Collins, who sang protest songs in the 70's but Buffy is among the best. The war protest songs "Moratorium" and "Song of the French Partisan" are some of the most moving in the collection. "Soldier Blue" gives a lump in the throat when you listen. The title track "She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina" touches everyones sense that their hopes and dreams when they were young were never met. All the tracks are a pleasure to listen to, but each listener will have a sense that one or two speak for their soul.

This is the album that made me an ardent Buffy fan twenty years ago when I was in my late teens. I assumed for a long time that it was everyone's favorite, until I realized that she has more than a dozen classic albums. These days, even though I have her entire collection, including her timeless Coincidence and Up Where We Belong albums, I probably listen to Quiet Places the most. However, there is still something so magical about the Ballerina album that sets it apart from the rest of her oeuvre. Her recording of "Song of the French Partisan" is so moving and picturesque that it was honestly ten years before I realized that the recording was done with only voice and guitar. I was only six when the movie Soldier Blue came out, so I didn't run across that one until adulthood either, but the title song, featured on Ballerina is equally stirring. The initial connection with this album really came with "Sweet September Morning", which I am sure I heard on the radio as a child. For me at least, the song speaks to a joyous spirituality; literally finding Jesus, or a love of a different sort. The theme has a charming ambiguity to make it interesting and it is certainly accessible enough for airplay. In my early thirties, after a night of drinking, nothing soothed the soul more than Buffy's cover of Neil Young's "Helpless" and the haunting "Now You've Been Gone For a Long Time". This album just doesn't get old. These days, I would consider her Spanish "The Surfer" to be a favorite. Her work with Neil Young's band Crazy Horse would be incentive enough for most people to get this album, but be aware that you are in for so much more.

I first bought this record 25 years ago and subsequently replaced it with the c.d. Few artists could match the range and strength of what is her most complete recording. The fact that Buffy wrote about half the album and the choices she made in selecting songs to cover, make this a certain Desert Island Disc. HIGHLIGHTS:1 The stunning version of Neil Young's Helpless with it's thumping drums, lamentive lyric and authorative vocal. Buffy expresses the meaning of the song so well. 2 The Surfer, Stratospheric vocal-has to be heard to be believed. 3 Song of the French Partisan- earily melancholic. 4 Now You've Been Gone-An acoustic treat. Other delights await. One of my all-time favourite album's from an artist who truly deserves the epithet.

A somewhat dated sounding album from Buffy--you can tell it was from the late 1960s/early 1970s based on the arrangements and instrumentation. Still, even dated sounding, I really enjoy the album since Buffy's vocals are never dated. Some of the songs feature simple piano backing and some have more rockish elements. Her performance of Carole King's Smackwater Jack is one of my favorite Buffy performances. The real problem with the CD however is that it was really poorly remastered. I don't know if the engineer was having a bad day or something, but a number of cuts have bad feedback and distortion that was not on the original album. It almost sounds like Vanguard lost the master tape and remastered this from a used LP. Vanguard is one of the least user friendly labels these days and often issues the original CD for a few years and then a new version with bonus tracks, so that collectors have to shell out additional money. To the extent they ever get around to re-issuing this album as an expanded CD version, hopefully they will give it the proper remastering that the album deserves.

When a good song bounces around your head since the 1960's, you know it's a classic. And that's certainly true of all the famous songs on this album. But for me, "Now you've been gone for a long time" is one of Buffy's most beautiful songs ever, never mentioned in fans' favorite song lists, and one that really lets her vibrato take on a role of underscoring the emotional content of the love song. It's delicate and profound, ethereal and mysterious...and the lyrics don't rhyme. Isn't that amazing! I love it. Buy this album...buy all of her albums...and listen to them for the next hundred years.

Buffy was reaching a more mature era in her early music with this CD, but the passion and the strange tremor in her voice were still there. (I personally love that tremor, it sets her apart from others.) The songs were, for the most part, meaningful. Smack Water Jack is an exception, in my humble opinion. It may be heresy, but I prefer Carole King's version, along with Neil Young's version of his song Helpless, but Buffy still makes them good songs. If I'd bought this in 71 when it first came out, I might have felt differently back then, but I don't remember seeing this or any other of Buffy's albums in the record stores in the Tulsa or Wichita areas where I was at at the time.