by Gene Fowler
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 Badlands—Ballads of the Lakota 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.
He also learned about Lakota life in the 21st century; and what he discovered shocked and saddened him. “The nearly 40,000 people on the Pine Ridge Reservation are the most poverty stricken in the United States,” he told me. “They’re the kindest and most loving and humble people I know, but they need jobs and opportunity. The Lakota teen suicide rate is 150% higher than the national average.”
Learning that death from hypothermia is also a major problem on the reservation, Kenny and his wife made their first visit to Pine Ridge not long after hearing Badlands, delivering blankets and other supplies. And to help provide economic opportunity on the reservation, the banjoist had a light-bulb moment.
“One day,” he recalled, “I looked down at my banjo that I’d had for 25 or 30 years, and I remembered that I had a buffalo leather strap for that banjo that a fellow had made for me in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He had asked me what kind of leather I wanted on the strap. I didn’t know anything about leather at the time. So, he suggested buffalo leather. And as fate would have it, I thought it was a great idea. I’ve since learned that buffalo leather is so strong and so soft that it’s just an amazing material for instrument straps.”
When the light bulb clicked on, Kenny thought, “Holy cow, these folks could make these instrument straps.” The Lakota already had a long history with leathercraft. “So, it was a match made in heaven.” Traditionally, the Sioux have had 127 different uses for various parts of the buffalo in daily life. “So, our little motto,” Kenny added, “became that we just made it 128.”
For years, Kenny and his late wife made monthly treks from Tennessee to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, hauling loads of elk and bison leather. (The source of Lakota Leathers’ hides remains a company secret.) On the reservation, 20 or more Lakota workers would spend a week turning the hides into a thousand straps that the Bohlings then carried back to Tennessee.
Doing business with folks on the reservation came with unique challenges, such as the fact that there are no street addresses, which made shipping materials to workers difficult. But through the years, thousands of Lakota Leathers instrument straps—elk leather for mandolin straps, bison for banjo and guitar—have been produced. Many custom-made straps feature a musician’s name or initials in elaborate beadwork, another traditional Lakota craft. Other beaded designs portray everything from chili peppers to dragonflies and horse heads. Antique ornaments adorn some of the straps.
Lakota Leathers instrument straps have been worn by such legendary musicians as the soulful honky-tonker John Anderson, bluegrass master Del McCoury, and yodeling Ranger Doug of Riders in the Sky. Marty Stuart, of course, who has become a friend of Kenny’s, has used Lakota straps with a special sense of purpose and pride.
“I remember the first time I met Marty,” Kenny recalled. “It was after a performance in Sevierville. He was tired, but he stayed to greet fans and sign autographs for a long line of folks. I gave him a piece of leather with beadwork on it that I’d gotten at Pine Ridge. Then I told him about taking blankets up there and how moved I’d been by the Badlands album. He said that was great and started to walk away. Then he turned around and came back and gave me a hug and shook my hand and thanked me for going there. He said he wished that more Americans could understand what life is like on the reservation today.”
At its busiest, Lakota Leathers’ straps have been carried by as many as 300 retailers around the world. Kenny often set up a booth at conventions of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America (SPBGMA), and the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA).
There have been setbacks, however, along the way. In one, a trusted distributor stole customers and designs. But just as Cambridge Satchel did when the British company was presented with a similar road hazard, Kenny and Lakota Leathers took it in stride, emerging even stronger. “The Lord blessed me with food on my table,” he said, putting the incident in perspective, “so I really can’t complain.”
And when COVID hit in 2020, a whole new set of problems arose. “We weren’t allowed on the reservation,” he recalled. And by that time, a new American social ill had beset Pine Ridge, the abuse of methamphetamines and the criminal activity that accompanies the drug. “The last time I was on the reservation, it was literally the first time I’d ever been scared there.”
Today, one extended Pine Ridge family makes Lakota Leathers instrument straps. And sadly, Kenny noted, tribal members with beadwork skills are dying out. “We have one lady who still does beadwork for a few custom straps, but it can take as much as 40 hours.”
As a result of all these changes and the unrelenting tick of “the old clock on the wall,” Kenny has decided to semi-retire and turn the company over to his daughter Caty Fox and her worship-service-guitarist husband Robbie Fox. They will move Lakota Leathers headquarters back to Sevierville, Tennessee.
Caty is expanding Lakota Leathers’ product lines to include such leather items as checkbook covers, wallets, key fobs, deerskin gloves and more—as well as other merch including mugs, ballcaps, etc. “Caty ran the company for the 280 days that her mom, my first wife Phyllis, was in the hospital before her passing,” said Kenny. “And Robbie is a high-tech marketing guru who was doing leatherwork when he and Caty first met. So, it’s all a good thing. I’m gonna do some traveling with my current wife, but I’ll still be around, behind the scenes.”
Most exciting, Kenny noted, Lakota Leathers is establishing a Lakota Entrepreneurial Fund that will funnel even more of the company’s profits to folks on the reservation. “We may only be helping one family right now,” he added, “but if everybody helped one family, the world would be a much better place. It’s like Billy Joe Shaver sang in one of his songs, ‘I am everybody’s brother.’ We’re the family of man. We’re everybody’s brother.”
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SIDEBAR: Badlands by Marty Stuart
If you like country music—or really any kind of music—and you’ve never seen Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives perform live, you’re missing something special.
I caught the lively outfit in a Dallas, Texas appearance right before the pandemic hit and it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Marty’s mandolin solo of the classic “Orange Blossom Special” was an out-of-body experience.
A child prodigy on the instrument, Stuart joined bluegrass giant Lester Flatt in his teens. He later joined Johnny Cash’s band before setting out as a solo artist. During his tenure with the Man in Black, Stuart played a benefit concert at Pine Ridge, where he first “fell in love” with the Lakota people. Though he’s a country-western traditionalist—and a preservationist of the music, whose collection of c&w artifacts will soon grace a museum in his hometown of Philadelphia, Mississippi—Stuart is also blessed with an independent streak that has led to industry-bucking concept albums like The Pilgrim and Badlands.
Ten years after Badlands first appeared, Michael Streissguth wrote in Rolling Stone that the album “stands as one of the best overlooked records of the last decade.” Stuart told the reporter, “I knew that it didn’t stand a chance commercially, but I knew spiritually it was the right record to make. The story needed to be told.”
And brother, he tells it.
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