The Family That Never Let the Drum Stop: Black Lodge Singers and Four Decades of Northern Plains Music
Kenny Scabby Robe had a simple problem. His twelve sons kept spending money at powwows.
His solution would eventually earn the family eight Grammy nominations and produce more than 30 albums of Northern Plains music.
Scabby Robe is Blackfeet, his wife Louise is Yakama. They put down roots in White Swan, Washington, on the Yakama Reservation, and around 1980 they built something that would last. The logic was direct, as his son Erwin later explained: if you’re going to be at powwows, you either dance or you sing.
They chose to sing.
Starting From Ceremony
The Black Lodge Singers take their name from the Black Lodge, a ceremonial society in Blackfeet tradition. Their music is northern-style powwow drumming, a way of playing rooted in the Great Plains, with a high, penetrating vocal style that carries across open grounds.
They sing in the Blackfoot language. They play a sacred buffalo drum.
Northern-style drumming isn’t background music. It’s how dancers and singers communicate across a powwow circle, and the drum is the heartbeat of the gathering. Groups that earn real standing on the circuit do so over years, performing at hundreds of events and building a reputation song by song.
The Scabby Robe family built exactly that kind of reputation.
Three Decades on the Powwow Circuit
By the early 1990s, Black Lodge Singers had their debut recording through Canyon Records, the Phoenix-based label that has been central to Indigenous music distribution since 1951. Albums came steadily after that.
They now have more than 30 recordings in their catalog, spanning intertribal powwow songs, veteran honor songs, and live recordings from grounds across the country. Two of those albums, Kid’s Pow-Wow Songs and More Kids’ Pow-Wow Songs, brought northern-style drumming into classrooms and living rooms.
Those children’s albums matter in ways that go beyond entertainment. They reached Native kids who might not have grown up near the powwow circuit. They put Blackfoot-language songs in the hands of American Indian families raising children far from home.
That’s a different kind of work than playing for the crowd.
What the Grammys Got Right
The Recording Academy first noticed in 1994. Black Lodge Singers contributed to Ancestral Voices, a collaborative recording with Diné flutist R. Carlos Nakai and guitarist William Eaton that earned a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Folk Album.
Seven more nominations followed over the next three decades.
Their most recent recognition came at the 2021 Grammy Awards, for an album called Nikso’ Kowaiks, which translates from Blackfoot as “My Relatives.” The group dedicated it to people affected by COVID-19. Fourteen family members performed on the record, three generations of Scabby Robes holding the drum together during one of the hardest years in recent memory.
The Grammy category kept changing around them, shifting from Traditional Folk to Native American Music to Regional Roots Music. The committee kept finding them anyway.
Winning at Schemitzun
The 2001 Schemitzun Festival in Connecticut put the family’s standing in concrete terms. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation runs Schemitzun, one of the largest powwows in the northeast, and it pays competition prizes that most music venues don’t come close to matching.
Black Lodge Singers won what’s called the “triple crown” that year, taking first place across three categories for a combined prize of $110,000.
That’s not a footnote in their story. That’s a measure of what forty-plus weekends a year on the circuit, year after year, actually builds.
Beyond the Powwow Grounds
The family has taken their drum into rooms that don’t usually hear it.
They performed before Pope John Paul II and collaborated with the Phoenix Symphony on a world premiere by composer James DeMars. They also played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, sharing a stage with the full range of American roots music.
None of that changed what they were doing at home. They were still making it to powwows. Still singing for the people on the ground, not for whoever else might be watching.
John Scabby Robe, one of Kenny’s sons, said it directly: “We don’t sing for the glory or the hype or the recognition. We’re singing from the heart for all the people out there.”
What Keeps the Drum Going
The Black Lodge Singers have never been a fixed lineup. Brothers relocate. Life pulls family members in different directions. The sons are raising their own children now, some of whom have grown up inside the circle of singers.
That’s how northern drum groups actually function. The circle expands. Someone is always learning. Someone is always ready. When one voice steps back, another has already been absorbing the songs.
That kind of resilience doesn’t come from strategy. It comes from treating music as a responsibility, something the community needs and that the family has taken on as an obligation. The Scabby Robes have been showing up to that obligation for more than four decades.
More than 30 albums, eight Grammy nominations, and over a hundred powwow performances a year at their peak across 40 to 45 weeks of travel. And they’re still performing.
The drum never stopped.
Still Singing
Native music traditions face real pressure. Language loss, the economics of reservation life, the difficulty of passing specialized knowledge across generations: none of that is abstract for Black Lodge Singers. It’s the daily context in which the group has always operated.
Their discography is documentation as much as it is art. Every album in the Canyon Records catalog is a record that these songs existed, that this family kept them alive, that the Blackfoot language had living singers in the 21st century.
That’s worth more than any award.
Keep watching what the Scabby Robes do next. They’ve been at this longer than most, and they show no sign of stopping.
Note: Sources differ slightly on the founding year, with the Yakima Herald citing 1980 and other sources citing 1982. The family account, as reported by the Herald, gives 1980.
Reporting based on AAA Native Arts, AllMusic, Yakima Herald, Wikipedia, and Canyon Records.