A lot gets written about the early music of North America and its influences on today's music. We talk about old time holler songs the slaves would sing in the fields and the Scottish and Irish roots of the music sung by the white settlers in the Tennessee Valley and the Carolina hills.

But all of us seem to forget there was a third group of people living in the same area, who had been living there actually for quite some time before the white people and their black slaves showed up. That would be the Native Americans, First Nations, Aboriginals, or whatever label you feel like affixing to them.

In the Carolinas it was no exception and the original people were the Tuscarora. Now for most people who have even heard of the Tuscarora, it's only because they are known as the nation that was the sixth of the Six Nations to join the Iroquois Confederacy. The truth of the matter was they were on the run and looking to escape white encroachment on their lands when they joined up with the Iroquois.

But for the Tuscarora, who weren't able to make good on the escape up north to what's now New York state, they ended up sharing a lot of the same experiences as the black slaves, including being made into slaves right beside them. So there was a fair bit of co-mingling of music going on right from those earliest days of settlement. In fact, according to singer songwriter Pura Fe, the two people's shared so much in common that when the Tuscarora were free they became an integral stop on the Underground railroad helping slaves escape to Canada.

Pura Fe should know about things like this because she can trace back her maternal Tuscarora line far enough to know she's the fourth generation in a row of seven singing sisters. So the singing style and music she learned from her mother, goes back to the time of her great-grand mother, which even at a conservative estimate would be the late 1800s.

When you listen to her sing on her latest album, Follow Your Heart's Desire, on the Music Maker label, you can understand how she ties into their mission of supporting music that is in danger of being lost. You can hear elements of almost every kind of old time music wrapped up in her songs, but there's also an underpinning of something distinct.

I don't even mean the obvious inclusion of Tuscarora language lyrics, or even native instruments like turtle shell rattles or drums; unfortunately you can find those instruments a dime a dozen on new age CDs these days. (Although finding anyone speaking the Tuscorora language would be a lot more surprising as its one of the tongues that was almost successfully made extinct by North American government assimilation programs. You can probably count of your hands and feet the number of completely fluent native-born Tuscarora speakers left in the world, current generations are having to be re taught to speak it as a second language.) It's more like there is a certain quality to her singing or an undercurrent to her music that makes it distinct from anything else you've heard before.