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

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.

Charlie Burnham

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

About

Charlie Burnham hasn't added a bio