Radmilla Cody

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #130 June/July 2007).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Radmilla Cody

Two Worlds

by Craig Harris

A sweet vocal tone, set to traditional instrumentation, has made Radmilla Cody one of America's most successful young Native American artists. The recipient of a "best female artist of the year" NAMMY award (the Native American equivalent of the Grammy), she continues to bring a fresh vitality to the sounds of Native music.

After three albums of traditional and contemporary songs, mostly composed by her uncle, Herman Cody, a Navajo language teacher currently working on his doctorate, Radmilla Cody has turned her gaze on the youngest members of her audience with Precious Friend, her fourth CD. With her vocals set to the beat of a hand drum and various percussion instruments, she brings warmth to songs by her uncle and/or Giuili Doyle about colors, frybread, donkeys, toads, lambs, and family. Standards from the Children's lexicon -- "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," "Eensie Weensie Spider," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb" -- are performed in the Navajo language.

The sweetness of Cody's singing belies a lifetime of personal struggle and hardship. Enduring racial prejudice as a child, for her half-black and half-Navajo heritage, she rose to the height of Miss Navajo Nation in 1998 before her involvement with an abusive drug-dealing boyfriend led to a 21-month prison sentence. "It was a learning process for me," said Cody, 29, from the office of Canyon Records, the Arizona-based Native American label for whom she records. "I was very young and impressionable. It was a very painful chapter in my life."

[cover #130]