Music Director

One of the most vital voices in American Roots music, Martha Redbone has been lauded by John Pareles of the New York Times for holding "both the taut determination of mountain music and the bite of American Indian singing." A Fellow of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Redbone is a multi-award-winning musician and charismatic songwriter celebrated for her tasty gumbo of roots music embodying the folk and country sounds of her childhood in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky mixed with the eclectic grit of her teenage years in pregentrified Brooklyn

EPSG:4326

Martha Redbone Roots Project

Oberlin College

Roots music singer and songwriter Martha Redbone will be in residence during her Cal Performances’ Illuminations concert visit to campus, and is offering a songwriting workshop to students based on the idea of a songwriting haiku: not a single word wasted, every word has meaning.

Fractured History: Martha Redbone Songwriting Workshop

University of California, Berkeley

Singer, songwriter, composer, and educator Martha Redbone broadens the boundaries of American Roots music with her eclectic and foot-stomping style: amplifying her Afro-Indigenous heritage with the sounds of Appalachian blues, folk, and gospel music. This talk will focus on the intersections of African American and Southeastern Native American culture in music.

Martha Redbone: American Roots and Rhythms

Bard College

For Colored Girls Broadway composer/songwriter/vocalist Martha Redbone and her band of Funkateers led by longtime collaborator/Music Director Aaron Whitby celebrate Black History Month with Afro-Indigenous stories and songs in Folk, Roots, Rhythm and Blues that ALWAYS bring home the funk to Joe's Pub. This is the full band’s first NYC show of the year. Book tickets early, not to be missed.!

Martha Redbone: Indigenous Funk Party

Joe's Pub

Artist, composer, vocalist, and Spiegeltent favorite Martha Redbone returns to Bard SummerScape with a musical celebration of the words and legacy of bell hooks. In this developmental work-in-process, Redbone and longtime musical collaborator Aaron Whitby embark on a multidisciplinary musical exploration of bell hooks’s landmark poetry collection, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place. Known for their powerful and award-winning settings of poets Ntozake Shange in for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (2019 Drama Desk Award; 2022 Broadway revival) and William Blake on the album, The Garden of Love: Songs of William Blake, Redbone and Whitby channel bell hooks’s meditative, confessional, and political lyricism into a genre-defying soundscape that echoes the spirit of her Kentucky roots and heritage she shares with Redbone.

Music Director

Aaron Whitby

Events

Upcoming events

10 - 11 Jul, 2026

Martha Redbone · Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College

Past events

Apr 6, 2025

Martha Redbone Roots Project · Oberlin Conservatory of Music

Feb 27, 2025

Fractured History: Martha Redbone Songwriting Workshop · UC Berkeley Department of Music

About

Aaron Whitby hasn't added a bio