This Sunday, Martha Redbone, the renowned vocalist, songwriter, composer, and educator, will grace the Finney Chapel stage at 7:30 p.m. in the next installment of the Artist Recital Series. Her unique voice has been recognized by The New York Times as “both the taut determination of mountain music and the bite of American Indian singing.” This highly anticipated performance was foreshadowed last fall when Redbone visited campus as part of the American Roots Residency program, which focuses on bluegrass, roots, and Americana music. She offered workshops and career talks during her visit in October, and now the time has come to see how that translates into her own performance.
Redbone is known for her unique voice, which she describes as a “tasty gumbo of roots music embodying the folk and mountain blues sounds of her childhood in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky, mixed with the eclectic grit of her teenage years in pre-gentrified Brooklyn.” Her connection to Black and Indigenous heritage shines through in her musical storytelling. Her album The Garden of Love reimagines the poetry of William Blake in her own shockingly complimentary style. Blake has been set in a wide variety of genres, so Redbone’s choice to ground it in the landscape of Black Mountain in Kentucky — her ancestral homeland — is completely fitting and completely fresh. It has been described by Blake scholar Steve Newman in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly as “deep and powerful … living music, transporting the incisive ethical and political critique at the heart of Blake’s imaginative vision to an Appalachian landscape,” which can “open up new horizons in thinking about what and how Blake’s songs mean.”
Redbone, along with her husband and longtime collaborator Aaron Whitby, a pianist, composer, and producer, has also received recognition for her writing for the stage. Their many musical theater pieces include Black Mountain Women, a devised piece that marries the dreamlike and the real, personal story of a woman who finds her ancestral homeland threatened by strip mining. They have also collaborated on Conversations, a formally experimental sung-through work inspired by Indigenous elders who have significantly affected Redbone’s life and Bone Hill: The Concert, a song cycle based on Redbone’s own life and the impact of her female ancestors.
Within this incredible repertoire, the work that she is most recognized for is composing, arranging, and orchestrating the score for the 2022 Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, which won Redbone and her husband the 2020 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play and the 2020 Audelco Award for Outstanding Composer of Original Music and Score. Oberlin performed Shange’s play — without Redbone’s score — in 2017. Redbone’s version features a score of jazz, blues, R&B, soul, and other diasporic genres to support the choreography by director Camille A. Brown and the Shange’s passionate text, performed by an all-Black, female cast. It celebrates Black joy in the midst of tragedy.
“I feel like Ntozake’s play is the American story for Black women,” Redbone said in an interview with AFROPUNK. “And I do say ‘Black women’ as opposed to ‘women of color.’ That’s a phrase that people keep using these days, but I don’t particularly feel that that’s an equal sentiment.”
Storytelling and identity are the heartbeat of Redbone’s work. Despite recognizing attempts at eradication and the horrors of erasure by white America, Redbone asserts in a National Sawdust article, “Ours is a rich history of oral traditions and storytelling.” She carries that legacy forward in her work, which continually bears personal and political relevance, engaging with her identity in regards to both ethnicity and gender. She also displays a reverence for others and a commitment to hearing their stories. This is apparent in almost all of her projects. Conversations and Bone Hill focus on the stories and impacts of marginalized voices, especially those of her ancestors. She cites her mother’s love for Shange’s for colored girls when she was young as her call to work on it. But her love for listening also manifests in her engagement with audience members. After Bone Hill, she remembered people approaching her to talk about their own family narratives.
“They talked about their grandparents coming to this country from Italy and India and other far-off lands,” Redbone said in a Nashville Scene article. “They talked about the pressure to assimilate and fit in, and yet still trying to hold onto traditions from home. It was amazing. I really didn’t expect that kind of response, so to me, that was the gift.”
On Sunday, she will bring her own gifts to Oberlin. Redbone will be joined by the members of her band, the Martha Redbone Roots Project — Whitby on piano, Charlie Burnham on violin, and Fred Cash, Jr. on bass.
“ We want people to sing along — we try to make it like church in an old country town,” Redbone said in an Oberlin Conservatory article. “We don’t expect people to sit there in total silence. It’s just not what the music that we sing is for.”
