Up Where We Belong

She had, I guess, if you can call it a hit, Right Time of the Night in 1977.

And she also had that duet with Joe Cocker from Officer and a Gentleman, Up Where We Belong.

Okay, so she duetted.

But do you know who wrote this song? Who co-wrote this song?

In there and fight.

Now, can I just suggest that we come up with a song that they might be able to do together? Now, you're a big fan of Up Where We Belong, which is not as a vaguely footy thing.

Yeah,

yeah.

Buffy St. Marie, indigenous Canadian-American singer-songwriter, Oscar-winning composer, visual artist, etc.

She won an Academy Award for the song Up Where We Belong for An Officer and a Gentleman.

She wrote the acclaimed song Universal Soldier, and she made several appearances on Sesame Street.

Her subjugation of Native Peoples movie, she was in Crazy Horse and Custer, also known as Son of the Morning Star.

The first article that seems to make the claim was in 1961 in the Springfield Sunday Republican, which called then 20-year-old Buffy St. Marie, quote, an American Indian girl attending the University of Massachusetts.

It should be noted at this point that St. Marie had started writing and performing songs, including Now That the Buffalo's Gone, a powerful song using the near extinction of the American bison as a metaphor for cultural genocide and passionately expressing the sadness of the continuous confiscation of Indian lands.

Okay, let's pause just for a second.

Playing devil's advocate, I thought to myself, maybe Buffy didn't create this image, but rather she perpetuated something attributed to her.

In combination with Buffy's black hair and shirt color to match, the feathers and her skin pop on the otherwise somber cover.

The back cover is where the narrative really takes shape.

Under a list of 13 songs that make up the album, including Now That The Buffalo's Gone, the album's first track, are the liner notes written by Vanguard co-founder and musicologist Maynard Solomon, who produced this and her next four albums.

This being her first album, the notes are really written to set the tone for her image.

He won Grammys for Tears in Heaven and I'll Never Love This Way Again, and then we look at his movie soundtracks.

He wrote Up Where We Belong.

The look is up where we belong.

Where the eagles cry on a mountain high

And My Heart Will Go On.

Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the heart does go on

For Up Where We Belong, he won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award from the motion picture An Officer and a Gentleman.

For My Heart Will Go On, he won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Grammy Award for the motion picture Titanic.

So maybe that's why Mark Ronson got her to sing it.

And then Steve Winwood's Valerie was actually a friend of the song's co-author, Will Jennings, a top songwriter whose other credits include The Crusader's Street Life, and Up Where We Belong from the An Officer and a Gentleman soundtrack, as well as much of Steve Wynwood's solo material.

The Valerie in question was almost certainly the musician and songwriter Valerie Carter.

Though she recorded a number of solo albums, her career never really took off, and she eked out a living writing songs for other artists and doing session work.