Country music runs deep in Native American communities, from a deep-seated love of Hank Williams to the influence of Native greats on the genre, like Robbie Robertson and Link Wray. For Oklahoma Cherokee singer and songwriter Agalisaga “Chuj” Mackey, even though country’s just one genre that inspired him early on, it’s become a natural way for him to write new music in the endangered Cherokee language. His new album, Nasgino Inagei Nidayulenvi (It Started in the Woods), coming October 18, 2024, on Oklahoma record label Horton Records, is sung entirely in Cherokee, with original songs that speak of love, death, a reverence for the natural world, and two covers, one from Williams and the other from Bob Dylan. With only 1,500 first language speakers left, the Cherokee language suffered greatly from the aggression of American residential schools, which taught an entire generation that Cherokee language and culture had no worth. It’s been a hard battle coming back from that kind of oppression, but language and culture activists like Chuj are pushing for a world in which Cherokee is sung, spoken, and present in their everyday lives. This language has been alive for thousands of years at this point and has much to say in modern life. For Chuj, the songs on his new album were actually easier to write in Cherokee than in English. Since Cherokee is a tonal language, it lends itself well to songwriting, “you sing your words,” he says. Plus, as Chuj points out, Cherokee is a remarkably adaptive language, letting songwriters write out an entire sentence in English as one long rhyming word in Cherokee. With a rock-solid country backing on the new album, the beauty of the almost lost Cherokee language shines through in Chuj’s humble singing. His voice is weathered in Cherokee, a soft burr behind his words reminiscent of a midwest accent, but in another tongue. And though he had two grandparents who spoke fluent Cherokee and a father who was an activist for the culture, Chuj has still had to work hard to build up his language skills. He currently teaches Cherokee language and culture to kids in his hometown in Oklahoma, and his goal with the album is to inspire other Cherokee language speakers to use this ancient and beautiful living language in their everyday lives.
Chuj was inspired originally by Cherokee filmmaker Jeremy Charles, who helped spark interest in the Cherokee language by producing an album of all Cherokee songs in 2022 from Oklahoma performers. Chuj had been singing country songs to his family just for fun at the time, enjoying learning Johnny Cash and Hank William tunes while his mom filmed him for Facebook. Charles saw the videos and reached out to Chuj to write a Cherokee country song for Anvdvnelisgi, Horton Record’s 2022 compilation album of newly written Cherokee songs across many genres of music. Charles had worked closely with Chuj’s father, a noted Cherokee language activist and consultant. “Gatlohiha (Cherokee Yodel)”, the song Chuj wrote for Charles’ compilation album, started him on the path as a songwriter, and with his new album of original songs, he’s showing himself an uncommon talent. “Once I wrote that first song in Cherokee and realised I could do it and that it’s not such an impossible thing, I got a real itch for it,” Chuj says. “I kind of got addicted to making those kinds of songs.” On his new album, Nasgino Inagei Nidayulenvi, Chuj taps into the deep country music vein that runs through so many Native communities. “My grandpa likes to go two-stepping to old Western singers like Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb,” says Chuj. “A lot of those country songs, that’s stuff that our people, that the Cherokee speakers have lived.”
Chuj grew up in a musical household in Kenwood, Oklahoma, “a reservation among reservations,” as he says, and a place where hunting, fishing, and wild food gathering was everywhere. He was sung to sleep as a small child by traditional Cherokee lullabies, originally recorded on wax cylinders, that he now sings to his children today. “Most of these traditional songs we sing to give thanks to specific plants or animals or to the natural environment,” Chuj explains. “That’s really the foundation of my voice as a singer, and I guess as a person too, because I’ve heard those since I was in the womb.” Chuj’s parents raised him in the heart of Cherokee country, taught from a young age by traditionalists who spoke the language and still hewed to the old religious traditions that came before the Western church. He learned stomp dance songs, a traditional form of dance performed by women with rattles on their legs that gave thanks to the earth and the environment, and he teaches these traditions today to Native youth at a Cherokee language and culture immersion school. Though he’s fueled by a love for the language and culture, he also sees his work with the youth as a greater contribution to the world. “They will grow up knowing these things,” he says, “and if everyone else would do something similar, the world would be a much more beautiful place with many different languages, many different cultures. I believe in diversity and the best way that I know how to help with that is to strengthen my own culture.”
The songs on Chuj’s album are drawn from home and family, like the opening song, “Tsitsutsa Tsigesv,” about his childhood growing up in Kenwood. This song, in particular, references the Cherokee reverence towards nature to talk about the turning of seasons. “Usdi Yona” is a song about a bear he wrote for the kids he teaches. “I took a bunch of songs that already exist in Cherokee about bears, and I just put them all together, like Legos.” But as a true fan of country music, he’s also included some darker murder ballads, like “Gatlohiha”, about a man who kills his wife for cheating and runs away to Mexico. Chuj wrote that song, in particular, with Jimmie Rodgers in mind, channelling his blue yodel and Western guitar. More in a blues vein, “Ahyvdawalohi” tells the story of a deranged man named Thunder who’s driven mad and murderous. Still, love is foremost in his mind as a songwriter, and he’s written here a beautiful love song for his wife, “Ginaliyosv.” Interestingly, this was a song he had to write in English first, then translate into Cherokee, as there’s no word for “love” in the Cherokee language. “Love is a hard thing to talk about in Cherokee because I think in our culture, traditionally, it was something that you didn’t have to say. A person knew that you loved them by how you treated them.” Wanting to expand the repertoire, Chuj included two covers on the album. “Akisodane Yigatloyiga” is a translation of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Dvkiyohiselvi” is a translation of Bob Dylan’s song “I Shall Be Released”. Interestingly, Dylan proved the hardest to translate. ‘“He leaves a lot of room for interpretation,” Chuj explains, “and Cherokee is not a language that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. It’s very direct and specific. What I say is what I mean, and that’s how the language is built.”
With so few Cherokee speakers left, it’s a wonder that Agalisiga “Chuj” Mackey was able to write a whole album of beautiful country and roots songs that resonate with any listener. But it’s a key part of his vision to revitalise the Cherokee language by bringing it into any possible aspect of modern life. It’s the only way to keep the language alive after the government worked so hard to kill it. The tragedy of the residential schools in the US was, of course, a key moment in the American government’s attack on the Cherokee language and a devastating blow that tore families apart. Chuj points out something else disheartening: how the US was able to devalue the language and culture. He talks about how there was a feeling that the language and culture couldn’t thrive in this world, that parents wanting to pass on only things of value to their children chose not to pass the language and culture along because they were made to believe it had no value. That’s what he’s fighting against, the idea that Cherokee is a dead language and culture with no meaning in a modern world. “Something I’ve heard a lot,” Chuj says, “is that in order for cultures to really continue to prosper in the modern world, they have to be willing to grow and they have to change. That’s hard for my culture to do because we’re so used to hanging on to what we have, and I agree with that. We need to hang on to what we have, but I’ve also realised that as a people, we need to change the things that we do, the things that we put our time into. We need to not be so shy and not try to hold this flame too close to the point where we put it out. We have to make this flame grow.”
Tsitsutsa Tsigesv ᏥᏧᏣ ᏥᎨᏒ (Live)
Nasgino Inage Nidayulenvi (18th October 2024) Horton Records