It isn’t obvious until the song plays in the last episode of “Wild Wild Country,” but the Netflix documentary series actually gets its title from Bill Callahan’s “Drover.” As the Feds track the getaway of controversial mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh from his Oregon commune, the weathered baritone formerly known as Smog proclaims, “One thing about this wild, wild country/It takes a strong, strong—it breaks a strong, strong—mind.”

The narrator of “Drover,” an indie-folk epic that opens Callahan’s 2011 album Apocalypse, is a rancher struggling to master his cattle. Complete with a trilling flute and percussion that cracks like a bullwhip, this contemporary Americana ballad may seem an odd choice to accompany the ’80s-set saga of a New Age-y commune (or, as some saw it, sex cult) with roots in India. But “Wild Wild Country” turns out to be, above all, the story of a minority religion coming to the U.S. in search of basic freedoms. In that sense, it’s a quintessentially American story befitting a quintessentially American soundtrack.

Bhagwan rose to prominence in the Age of Aquarius, cultivating a global following with a philosophy that mixed Eastern meditation, Western psychotherapy, and ideas from multiple religions. His flock and fortune grew in the mid-’70s, when he opened an ashram in the Indian city of Poona that attracted throngs of rich American flower children. Then, the guru narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a Hindu fundamentalist. According to Ma Anand Sheela, Bhagwan’s onetime second-in-command and the show’s most controversial figure, that was when the group got the idea to build an international headquarters in the theoretically more pluralistic U.S.

Through interviews with Sheela and other members of Bhagwan’s former inner circle, “Wild Wild Country” directors Chapman and Maclain Way recount the Rajneeshees’ brief early-’80s tenure on a sprawling plot of ranchland in the Oregon high desert. Thousands of followers made the pilgrimage to construct this communal city, which they christened Rajneeshpuram. Their maroon clothing, unorthodox belief system, wild dance parties, and polyamorous ways alarmed their conservative, working-class neighbors in the tiny town of Antelope. And from there, it was war. As interviewees from both sides calmly explain, in less than five years, the conflict escalated to include bombings, murder plots, large-scale immigration fraud, and history’s biggest (not to mention strangest) bioterror attack on American soil.

It’s a story that suggests many obvious musical motifs, from sitar jams to hippie free-love anthems. And there are certainly missteps in the soundtrack—namely, a somewhat histrionic original score by a third brother, Brocker Way, that has been both praised for heightening viewers’ connections to the show and criticized for manipulating them. But the decision to pair the documentary with songs by contemporary indie-folk artists like Callahan, Marlon Williams, Damien Jurado, and Kevin Morby was an inspired one. Instead of exoticizing Rajneeshpuram or consigning it to a remote and incomprehensible past, these syncs situate the community within ongoing narratives of America as a land of immigrant determination, frontier justice, rugged individualism, and the constitutionally protected rights to speak, worship, and congregate freely.