Charles Wakefield Cadman

[1] By the age of eighteen, he was working as a clerk in a railroad office in Homestead, also in steel country.

They began to work together, she writing the text and he the music for their first piece, a hymn for which they were paid one and a half dollars.

[3] He was greatly influenced by American Indian music, which he had been studying, especially through the work of ethnologists Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche.

[4] Having published several articles on American Indian music, Cadman became regarded as one of the foremost experts on the subject.

They began work that year on an opera; Cadman had already started to pull melodies from three printed collections of Omaha and Pawnee music published by ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who also was with the Smithsonian.

[4] Together with librettist Nelle Richmond Eberhart, Cadman and La Flesche worked together for about three more years to create an opera based on Omaha stories and music.

[4] In 1915 Cadman was named a national honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity.

She provided much of the plot for the libretto of The Robin Woman (Shanewis), based on contemporary Native American issues.

Redfeather made her opera debut in the lead role in a 1924 performance in Denver,[8][9] and also sang it in Los Angeles in 1926.

[10] Some scholars believe that Cadman's involvement with the so-called Indianist movement in American music resulted in some critics failing to judge his works on their own merits.

These included The Sky Hawk (1929), Captain of the Guard (1930), a musical set during the French Revolution; Women Everywhere, and Harmony at Home, all Pre-code films.

Along with Russian-American Dmitri Tiomkin, Cadman was considered one of Hollywood's top film composers of the period.

Dramatist and playwright Percy Jewett Burrell, a fraternity colleague of Cadman, directed the production.