In any group of Buffy songs there are decorous waltzes, lyrical efflorescences weighted with imagery which does not exclude an occasional glimpse of a steel mind. Her French style torchers have all the gripping qualities of that superannuated mode, combined with unconventional love song lyrics. Other love songs are warmly sentimental, with haughty and forbidding undercurrents. One quality they all have in common is their lively tension.

Buffy's songs have a variety that makes them seem written by women from different backgrounds…. (pp. 61-2)

The most carping criticism comes from the genre loyalists whose boundaries she crosses. The pop audience has little patience with a writer of songs of social concern. They accept her ballads. The folk-protest group disdain the ballads but applaud her antiwar and socially conscious songs, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone," "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying," and "Suffer the Little Children." She is unacceptable to the country audience personally because of her antiwar stand, but her "Piney Wood Hills" was brought into the country audience by Bobby Bare in 1967. (pp. 62-3)

While exploring other styles of writing and more personal themes, she dealt a blow to the folk purists when she wrote the pop standard "Until It's Time for You to Go" in 1965. It passed into the mainstream of pop veiled in the decorous waltz of its melody. Alarms were not sounded by anyone who realized that the lyrics held a message that was new to pop music; equal partnership between lovers with no promises of permanence.

It was love without illusion, a temporary arrangement between equals with their own lives to fulfill. It is indeed a woman's song, written to be sung by a woman, even though men did not hesitate to sing it.

Women's myths and roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers are amply stated in popular songs. Buffy's intent, when writing songs from a female point of view, was to create material devoid of conventional female masochism. One step was the equal relationship of "Until It's Time for You to Go." (pp. 63-4)

Buffy Sainte-Marie developed the greatest artistic scope of all her contemporaries, from the righteous indignation of the protest songs to the velvety romanticism of her ballads, and beyond, to the unexpected silliness of her rock 'n' roll ditties. She refers to her songs as marks of passing through the carnival midway of life: "bruises, scars, lipstick smooches, and cotton candy stains." (p. 64)