Music—I’ll venture to say we can all agree—is a powerful force.
In 2008, it even inspired one of the most unique leathercraft outfits I’ve run across, Lakota Leathers. Based for most of the last 15 years in Sevierville, Tennessee, the company produced thousands of bison and elk leather guitar, banjo and mandolin straps, made by Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Today, Lakota Leathers is based in Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, and is transitioning to a new generation of management that will move its headquarters back to Sevierville. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first let’s go back to the music, the simple, yet profound, phenomenon of soundwaves that can change lives.
Banjo player Kenny Bohling first heard Marty Stuart’s critically acclaimed album shortly after its release in 2005. “It moved me more deeply than any music I’d ever heard before,” Kenny told me in a recent phone interview. Especially poignant for the Tennessee banjoist was the nine-minute song “Three Chiefs,” which briefly tells the stories of Lakota leaders Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and Sitting Bull as they leave this world and meet the Great Spirit. The song motivated Kenny to study the tragic history of the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota, and how this proud nation became confined to the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1889.
