Martha Redbone

Martha Redbone is a Native & African-American vocalist/songwriter/composer/educator. She is known for her music gumbo of folk, blues and gospel from her childhood in Harlan County, Kentucky infused with the eclectic grit of pre-gentrified Brooklyn. Inheriting the powerful vocal range of her gospel-singing African American father and the resilient spirit of her mother’s Cherokee/Shawnee/Choctaw culture, Redbone broadens the boundaries of American Roots music. With songs and storytelling that share her life experience as a Native and Black woman and mother navigating in the new millennium, Redbone gives voice to issues of social justice, bridging traditions from past to present, connecting cultures, and celebrating the human spirit. Her latest album “The Garden of Love-Songs of William Blake” is “a brilliant collision of cultures” (New Yorker).

Redbone’s recordings, touring and cultural preservation workshops are under her own label imprint BlackFeet Productions, a partnership she shares with longtime collaborator/husband Aaron Whitby. Their recent work has been in Theater; Bone Hill:The Concert, a multidisciplinary theatrical concert touring nationally funded by Joe’s Pub/NEA, NEFA. NPN, Lincoln Center. “Stars”- NY Theater Workshop- Jim Nicola, and “Primer for a Failed Superpower”, Rachel Chavkin. Redbone is the Composer of Original Music and Score for the 2019 revival “For Colored Girls”, a choreopoem by the late Ntozake Shange, where Redbone honors the author’s 1976 classic by intertwining her original compositions celebrating the music of the African American diaspora with the beautiful choreography of Tony Award-nominee Camille A. Brown, Public Theater, NYC. Redbone and Whitby are currently in development with new work “Black Mountain Women” directed by Les Waters at The Public Theater (MAPFund/Creative Capital), a timely piece about the ongoing environmental destruction of her ancestral homeland in Appalachia told through the lives of 4 generations of women in her matriarchal Cherokee family.