I’m sure many people have written songs about bigfoot, aka sasquatch, aka the Great Northern Wood Ape.

Offhand, however, I am aware only of three.

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‘Sasquatch’ by Ani DiFranco—from her excellent cd Binary (2017) which benefits, & this song especially, from a lush Tchad Blake mixing job—is a playful contemplation rather than a deep dive.

“Hey Sasquatch—your footprint got nothin on mine! … I film you as you run by…” & what might almost be an Exile On Main Street reference, “I love you, you can drink from my cup… now come out with hands up!”

The bass line summons tall-dark-&-hairy slouching past a trailcam, the rest of the music & melody waltzes light circles around him on the path.

https://anidifranco.bandcamp.com/track/sasquatch

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Next to cross my mind is a song by Giants In The Trees—it’s right there in the name isn’t it—also called, ‘Sasquatch’. ‘Sasquatch’ is the opening track on Giants’ debut self-titled CD Giants In The Trees (2017). It probably means nothing that this came out the same year as Ani’s Binary… if anything we’re only now approaching peak-wood-ape in 2025!

This one’s more ethereal, even witchy. Rootsy, woodsy—Giants is a backwoods band from southern Washington State after all, sharing turf with the title character, & the lyrics reflect this with references to tall trees, devil’s club (a stinging shrub of the Pacific Northwest), mountains & waterfalls & deep seas.

This song is less playful than Ani’s, more evocative of stepping outside in the backwoods wonderland & hearing strange sounds from the depths of the impenetrable woods in which one lives. Jillian Raye’s lyric does share with Ani’s a romanticism: “Wild man, where do you sleep?” Which is worth examining, but not right now.

All of this over the requisite stonking bassline… What is it about the Wood Ape that brings out something so particular in bass players? (A remix by drummer Erik Friend places more emphasis on the bassline, which is positively hairy, & played by Krist Novoselic who could easily be mistaken for a small wood ape himself.)

Points to Giants also for use of one of the older terms for bigfoot: ‘Wild man’. At least a few indigenous terms for the wood ape translate to that or something like it. More on which below.

EF remix:

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Next up is Kate Bush with a song called… ‘Wild Man’!

‘Wild Man’ is from an album called 50 Words For Snow (2011), & is set in the Himalayas… Do we consider ‘yeti’ & ‘bigfoot’ & ‘wood ape’ to be synonyms? Yes & no, but for the moment I’m fine with it.

Trading a sense of fun for earnest testimony, ‘Wild Man’ tells stories of camping in the mountains & first hearing, then seeing, the title character. “You’re not a langur monkey, nor a big brown bear—you’re the wild man! … They say you’re an animal…. They want to hunt you down.”

When the narrator encounters footprints, she covers them up. In this way the wood ape is protected from human predators, scientific dissections, tourism & the like.

“The lamas say you’re not an animal,” the song concludes. Indigenous Americans have tended, historically, to agree. Hence, ‘wild MAN’ (or ‘wild HUMAN’ I suppose, before patriarchic translation) rather than some other descriptive term… Tho in using phrases like the goofy diminutive ‘bigfoot’ or the opaque-if-more-or-less-Indigenously-sourced ‘sasquatch’, colonized North America has managed to reduce the Wood Ape to mere creature status, even were its existence widely accepted (as it was in rural areas, so near as I can tell, prior to roughly world war 2).

It is interesting to me that all three of these songs are sung by women & all cast the wood ape as a “man”. (Despite the Patterson-Gimlin footage, which clearly shows a lady bigfoot… but maybe everyone is not up on this.) There’s a long riff to be had on the various projections laden upon the wood ape by various perceivers, & the consequences of those projections for the wood ape & for us…

But, again, not now.