South Dakota Indian Terry Ree first puffed the pipe of peace with Bruce Williams, Caucasian Idahoan, many moons ago.
But not for long.
”We stopped when we found out it causes severe brain damage,” Williams recalls.
Instead, Williams & Ree began insulting each other publicly. In nearly two decades since, ”The White Guy & The Indian” have entertained country music audiences coast to coast, occupying stages with such stars as the Oak Ridge Boys, Merle Haggard, Lee Greenwood, Roy Clark and Mel Tillis.
Lately they have broken into series television. In the unlikely company of Florence Henderson on the Nashville Network`s increasingly popular cooking show, ”Country Kitchen,” they have helped ratings increase by nearly 50 percent over last year, and there`s now talk they may get a network series of their own.
Their stage act consists of ”being funny” and/or singing. It is a sort of ethnic-oriented ”Hee Haw” with strong dashes of ”Saturday Night Live.” Their current live ”underground” LP, ”Feed And Mingle With Live Indians,” boasts such random observations as:
Williams: ”What do you call an Indian with an I.Q. of 100?” Ree:
”What?” Williams: ”A tribe.”
Ree (to a strongly Aryan northern Midwest audience): ”Germans are dumb people. Who else would heat up potato salad?”
Williams (suddenly, loudly and official-soundingly, through bullhorn):
”Step away from the car, Indian. Come out with your food stamps in the air. Do what you want to the girl, but leave the dog alone.”
Ree (after pause): ”What we do now, Chemo Therapy?”
Their music is similarly strange.
In vocal harmonies that are unexpectedly exciting–accompanied more than competently by Williams` bass and Ree`s guitar–they do a humorous version of the Indian-oriented `50s hit ”Running Bear” and a Woody Guthrie parody titled ”This Land Ain`t Your Land.”
Their banter pokes fun at not only Indians, Germans and (in Ree`s word)
”honkies,” but also at Scandinavians, blacks, TV preachers and any other group that attracts their attention. But their humor is more companionable than vicious.
”Somebody told me once, `You guys shoot rubber arrows,` ” Ree says,
”and I think that`s a pretty good description.
”We zing, but it`s not a sticking kind of zinger. We do it as if to say, `Maybe you`d want to think about some of these things sometime.` If people really listen to what we`re doing, they see that we`re not just picking on Indians or anybody else; we`re also saying a lot of true things that Indians and everybody else can relate to.
”One of the most thrilling things that has happened to me was when we did the commencement for Pine Ridge High School on the Pine Ridge (South Dakota) Reservation. Instead of a speaker, they wanted us to come do a show, and we did.”
In all their professional years, he adds, they have had but one
”confrontation” with an Indian member of an audience. He was ”a little inebriated, and it was back in `73 or `74, around the (most visible) time of AIM (the American Indian Movement).”
”But when we play Indian audiences, I still stay real close to Terry,”
Williams confesses.
The unlikely twosome (”there are comedy teams of a white guy and a black guy, a white guy and a Mexican, even a white guy and a BLIND Mexican,”
Williams notes, ”but no other white guy and Indian”) was formed in 1968 at Black Hills State College in Spearfish, S.D., an institution Williams describes as a perennial national powerhouse in nothing.
It was, however, the nation`s No. 2 college in American Indian enrollment, and Ree–who had led bands in South Dakota bars throughout high school–went there on a government grant to study music because that seemed the only alternative to getting drafted into the Vietnam War.
There he met Williams, a theatre major who had arrived on a scholarship. The two of them managed to remain students until the war was nearly over, but from the beginning their interest was extracurricular. Almost immediately, they were working parties and bars.
”We started out doing music, but we knew how to play only 10 or 12 songs, and the banter we did to fill time between them soon became more successful than the music,” Ree recalls.
The twosome soon noticed they were getting paid $100 a week to play the same places, and entertain the same crowds, for which bigtime national touring acts were earning $3,000. Eventually one of these national performers, Marv Dennis of Dennis & Cree, got them a contract with his Minneapolis booking agent, and their compensation started to improve.
Around 1972, the agent booked them for their first appearance outside South Dakota–into a comparatively fancy Vincennes, Ind., showroom that routinely employed such performers as Red Skelton, the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots.
There they made a chilling discovery: ”We didn`t have a show.”
”We had thought we had one when we got there,” Ree explains, ”but we had to admit we didn`t when the people in the audience just sat there still waiting for one while we were on. We died a horrible death.”
The demise stretched out across two weeks, the length of their Vincennes booking. But the agony was instructive.
Until then, they had just gone onstage and done whatever they felt like doing at the time. By the time they left Vincennes, they had come up with a structured show that relied on tried-and-true routines.
”It was there we realized that some nights we made people laugh and other nights we didn`t,” Ree says, ”and we started thinking about what we were doing on nights we did that was different from nights we didn`t. Then it started to work every night.”
After Vincennes, they worked showrooms and bars coast-to-coast. In 1979-80, they even took a Los Angeles apartment to try to get on Johnny Carson`s ”Tonight Show.”
For 18 months, they were in and out of such venues as the Comedy Store, where they worked the same stages as Richard Pryor, Robin Williams and Jimmy Walker. They managed to get on the ”Dinah Shore Show,” ”Make Me Laugh,”
”Comedy Shop” and ”Don Kirschner`s Rock Concert,” but the ”Tonight Show” rebuffed them.
Giving up the apartment, they went home in disgust to South Dakota–and another break. Lacy J. Dalton cancelled a date in which she was supposed to open for the red-hot Oak Ridge Boys, and Williams & Ree were rushed into the breach as her substitute. The Oaks liked Williams & Ree`s show and started using them as a frequent opening act around the country.
Two and a half years ago, The White Guy & The Indian decided it was time to make another run at television. Emigrating to Nashville from South Dakota in hopes of making occasional appearances on The Nashville Network, they saw the move pay off handsomely last August when the producer of ”Country Kitchen” offered them a regular slot replacing the Hager Twins.
”We get 4 to 7 minutes of our own each week to just go nuts,” says Williams.
Whereas Williams, a sheet metalworker`s son, is somewhat literarily inclined (and, Ree says, ”makes up” a lot of their spoken and sung humor), Ree, whose late father was a machinist, is taps into a much older culture.
A direct descendant of Sioux chiefs, he screams a blood-curdling chant right out of the old Custer movies whenever he can`t think of something to say onstage. This, he says, ”throws the ball” to Williams, who must then come up with something.
”Usually he acts as if he thinks he recognizes it as the tune of some hit song and starts guessing the title,” he adds. ”It`s about the dumbest thing I ever heard of, but it works.”
Almost everything they do now seems to work. Their main problem is finding a category for it. As long as they`ve been together, they`ve felt about as alienated from peer groups as the Lone Ranger did when he and Tonto became surrounded by Indians and Tonto started calling him Paleface.
Musicians call them comedians, and comedians call them musicians.
”It makes us wonder `What the hell are we?` ” Ree says.
”I guess we`re just entertainers. All we know is, put us in front of 10,000 people for 20 or 30 minutes, and we`ll leave them laughing. We`ve been doing it for 18 years.”
