Buckskin by Cherokee Rose

Cherokee Rose's debut release Buckskin came together thanks to a kismet personal connection to a session engineer at Prince’s storied Paisley Park Studio. He liked her songs, and thought they should be recorded. Rose never even considered recording the informal, deeply personal material she had been penning. "I was a mom with three kids at home," she reflects. "I would have never thought I would ever record or play a show."

Rose was booked for piecemeal studio time at Prince's Paisley Park Studio at off-hours: middle of the night and early morning sessions to get her songs committed to tape. The recordings existed in a sort of suspended-animation: issued as a small run cassette-only demo tape and sold at shows direct to a smattering of fans in 1993. No record label, no distribution. Rose doesn’t own a cassette deck on which to play it today. In fact, Rose hadn’t heard her earliest recordings in over fifteen years when she was approached to reissue them. Joe Steinhardt of Don Giovanni states "Buckskin may be one of the last great undiscovered lost records."

"I wish I could remember where I found Buckskin but I am always buying interesting and obscure looking tapes as it's how I've discovered some of my favorite albums of all time," Steinhardt continues. "Whenever I had downtime I would search for anything I could find about her, hoping to someday get in touch and find out more about the tape."