Songfacts®:

• When singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie emerged on the folk scene with her debut album in 1964, she was determined to do things her way - a sentiment she expressed on the title track. In a career that's spanned more than 50 years, she certainly followed her own path, singing protest songs about the mistreatment of indigenous people but refusing to fit the "Pocahontas with a guitar" stereotype, and bucking "sellout" outcries from the folk community by co-writing pop songs like "Up Where We Belong."
• In 2015, Sainte-Marie included "It's My Way" on her album Power In The Blood. She explained how the song has remained relevant half a century after its release: "The song still works and the message of finding your own uniqueness and being your own mutation is still relevant. In this world of drones and robots and corporate jobs, people don't get much encouragement to be the something new that only each one of us can be."
• America was in the grip of Beatlemania in 1964, the same year the Fab Four landed in the States and gave their iconic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Yet it was Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose debut folk album didn't even make the charts, who was named Best New Artist by Billboard magazine.
• Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote nearly all the material for It's My Way! making her the first modern female singer-songwriter, ahead of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Janis Ian, and Carly Simon. "I didn't know I was ahead of the pack at the time because I didn't know there was going to be a pack," she told The Guardian in 2022.