Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, there was music in America: the music of the first Americans, the American Indians.

Like many other so-called primitive peoples (those who haven't developed writing), the American Indians used music and song in practically everything they did. They had songs to accompany work; religious songs; songs for weddings, funerals, and other social ceremonies; game songs; songs for social dancing; lullabies; love songs; hunting songs; war songs.

To the Indians, songs were not only entertainment or art. Songs had power, and the most powerful songs could put the singer in touch with the spirits who controlled everything that happened. A particular song could prevail on the spirits to help an Indian heal sickness, fight off his enemies, or make crops grow.

Many Indians accompanied with dancing, and singing which the main features of a tribe's major religious ceremonies. Songs and spoken tales were often the way the great mythological stories were carried from generation to generation, since there was no written language.

After the Pilgrims landed in America, white soldiers and settlers slowly forced the Indians from their homelands to ever smaller and less desirable territories. They hired hunters to kill the buffalo, the Indians' main food supply, when they wouldn't move peacefully. In these and many other ways, the whites tried to destroy the Indians' way of life and take their land. Eventually, American's hoped to absorb the Indians into the white man's culture, or eliminate them.

Change of location and repressing of Indian culture were not the only things that affected Indian music. To survive, some Indians resorted to entertaining tourists. They gave up their native singing styles and mixed them with the stereotype that white had.

In recent years, mainly because of the work of American Indian rights groups, there has been a revival of interest among younger Indians in their traditional culture. These young people are learning the old ways and adapting outmoded songs and dances to the present. War dance songs are being dusted off and used for social dancing. The Indians hold powwows in their communities. These large gatherings, in which the main emphasis is on singing and dancing, bring together members of many tribes whose homelands were once far apart, but which have been relocated near one another, a chance to learn from each other.

During the folk boom of the late fifties and the sixties, several performers of American Indian descent wrote and recorded protest songs in the popular folk style, spelling out the abuses their people had been subjected to. The best known of these were Buffy Sainte-Marie and Peter Lafarge.