Martha Redbone Interview
A Creative Life Rooted in Afro-Indigenous Identity and Appalachian Traditions
Below is the transcript of my conversation with Martha Redbone. The podcast, video and show notes are here:
Martha Redbone:
It's interesting because when you're growing up with your grandparents, you don't have a label. This is just your family. I was not being taught per se. You are native, you are Chickamauga Cherokee, we are. It's not a label like that. You just exist and someone passes away. This is what you do. It's not because we are this. It was never given a label. It just was not that type of thing. I learned later as a teenager being in New York City, my mom said, oh, this is what that is.
Leah Roseman:
Hi. You're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Martha Redbone is acclaimed for her powerful performances as a singer, as well as her prize-winning songwriting, composition, and arranging. For over 30 years, she's been in a successful collaboration with her partner, Aaron Whitby, and we talked about some of their new theatrical projects, including Black Mountain Women, The Sex Variants of 1941 and Guardian Spirit, the words of bell hooks. Throughout this episode, you'll be hearing clips from Martha's powerful album, the Garden of Love, which sets the poetry of William Blake to the diverse music of Appalachia, written with Aaron and John McEuen of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Many people think of the music, culture and history of Appalachia in terms of the blend of white settlers in the area, but Martha's family heritage from from Harlan County Kentucky includes African American, British, Chickamauga-Cherokee and Mississippi Choctaw. . She shared her experiences growing up with her grandparents as part of a coal mining family, as well as the dramatic changes she's witnessed in Brooklyn over several decades. In this wide ranging episode, you'll also hear Martha's great advice for self-care, maintaining boundaries and working collaboratively.
We started this conversation with Martha's collaborations with clarinetist Tasha Warren and cellist Dave Eggar, and if you missed my interview with Tasha last year, it's linked to this one in the show notes. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I've also linked the transcript to my website, LeahRoseman.com. It's a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode where you'll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast.
Hey, Martha, thanks so much for joining me today.
Martha Redbone:
Thank you. Thanks having me. Leah,
Leah Roseman:
I first discovered your music when I was researching Tasha Warren last year, the clarinettist because of your powerful piece on her first album with Dave Eggar, so people who heard that episode will have heard a little bit of Black Mountain Calling, and I'll be linking that episode, but I was in communication with Tasha and Dave and you about a new project coming out in 2026, so we'll talk about that a little bit. They gave me a little bit of fascinating information, but I did communicate with Dave that we're going to do an episode with him in a few months, actually with a focus on that new album.
Martha Redbone:
That's amazing.
Leah Roseman:
So I understand there's this collaboration with children in both Tennessee and Kenya and this teacher, Manny Elswick with your piece?
Martha Redbone:
Yeah, that was a wonder, wonderful collaboration. We went up to Vermont and worked in this really beautiful recording studio and just stunning, and we just played with some improvisation and there was something, there was almost like a, I ended up kind of singing a prayer, a type of, in a way, it felt like a prayer, like a healing kind of mother prayer, and we just, it sparked from there. I ended up adding some vocal layers and layers upon layers, and Dave and Tasha just, we ended up making what I call almost like a braid, a kind of sweet grass braid of this weaving, and it was so warm and loving and really, really beautiful, and so they went to the studio in Bristol and worked on it a bit more, and then they got in touch and said they were working with some kids and they loved some of the words and phrases that I was singing, and so we just ended up developing that, and then the children ended up singing those songs together and it was just really beautiful, and I added a bit more, and then we just had this magical piece that came about.
Wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
Did Tasha and Dave reach out to you for that project initially a few years ago?
Martha Redbone:
Of course, yes. We became friends with the first album, With Ourself, the Emily Dickinson phrase, and David asked me to create a piece for that, and it was during the pandemic, and so we kind of did everything online, and it was really interesting. It was the first time that we ever worked in that capacity of course times, and a lot of people worked in that capacity online and not just doing zooms. And so that piece came about. Black Mountain Calling came about, and I've been working on a lot of projects that honor my homeland in Kentucky, in Harlan County, Kentucky, where I'm from, and I've been doing this for some time now, just having pieces that celebrate the land and I guess trying to recreate in a way this, for want of a better phrase, and kind of ancestral sound and ancestral calling that you hear when you're in the woods up there really high up.
And so Black Mountain Calling came out of our first collaboration, and it was so beautiful and so easy, and then we got together and had a concert up in the University of Michigan as part of the series that Tasha ran. Again, it was just absolutely stunning to be a part of that project. Not only has it been a bucket list to work with Dave Eggar, of course, we have so many friends in common, but to actually be able to spend a lot of time with him creatively. And Tasha, who is just absolutely magical, a magical, magical musician. I call her, my Wonder Woman was usually when I speak to her, Hey, wonder Woman, but just their combination, this chamber music piece that I worked on was just very, very special. And then they called me again and said, Hey, we want you to do this again. And I went, what? Oh my goodness, though. Come on, let's do this.
Leah Roseman:
It occurs to me we really should play a clip of Black Mountain Calling here, because people, even if they heard this episode, it was many months ago, so I think we should do that for the listeners.
Martha Redbone:
Sure. (Music)
Leah Roseman:
I know you have some new projects. I was curious, you have this new musical you're working on, Black Mountain Women. Is that related to your Bone Hill project?
Martha Redbone:
In a way, in a way, I guess I would call it - you know, Bone Hill is an interesting project because we wanted to talk about the resilience of the people and the land and through my own family stories, and Black Mountain Women is a new piece that is unrelated but kind of related at the same time. So it's based on this family stories, however, it talks about something much deeper and it talks about the land in particular specifically and the people who continue to live on this land and what it means when the dead meet, walk among the living. So it's a kind of, I guess, mystical piece. Not so much Bone Hill, which was much more of an historical and musical timeline. This is not in a particular scenario, and so I'm excited to get back to that in the fall. We started that one just before the pandemic and then came to a grinding halt and did a couple of workshops and things and figured things out, and then we're going to get back on board. And I love that piece. Our book writer for Black Mountain Women is Naomi Izuka, and our director is Les Waters.
Leah Roseman:
So this is with Public Theater in New York?
Martha Redbone:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And so it's a full musical theater piece.
Martha Redbone:
Yes. It will be more of a play with music, I think, as opposed to a musical.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, so in terms of the history of Appalachia and your family, can you speak a little bit about that so people understand?
Martha Redbone:
Sure. It's interesting because I do a lot of concerts and I'm always on the road with my band, and we play our music and we call it The Roots Project, and it allows us to kind of dig in deep to the history of the southeastern region of the United States. We touch on many, many things. We touch on civil rights songs, old time blues songs, we talk modern songs. We even dig into our William Blake project as well with the sounds of Appalachia being set with the poetry of William Blake and some of the meanings that are very similar. (Music)
To the pictures of this land. In fact, William Blake even writes about, has a poem about being on rejecting England and settling on the shores of the Ohio River in one of his poems. And I come from a really small town in Harlan County, which is the infamous Harlan County coal country, and I come from a family of coal miners and I, it's interesting because so many people don't even know the history of Harlan County. They only have this one documentary, Harlan County, USA, which tells a major story about the unions and this kind of thing. But what it didn't really address where all the Black coal miners who had migrated to the region after slavery, and so there were Black coal miners who worked in the mines as early as the 1880s. That is not touched on my grandfather. I shouldn't say my grandfather. My great-grandfather built many of the homes for the "colored people", quote unquote, "colored people" who worked in those mines.
And that was in the turn of the century as well. And so there's just a real rich history that I think many people are not familiar with that I felt needs to be, for want of a better word, lifted up and kind of celebrated as well. And the story of coal mining and how hard it was for all of the people and with unions and strike breakers and Jim Crow all at the same time, and the segregation and then the integration all along because these towns are very small. So it's a really rich history to be unfolded and shared and celebrated. My grandfather, this is my mom's dad died from black lung. He worked in those mines and was there in the early 1940s, and he was gone by 62 years old. So it was a really tough life, and so was my grandpa's brother was there. Uncles all worked in the coal mines. There's the famous, what we call in the regional, the Eastern Kentucky Social Club, which was a place for the black coal miners and their families to have events and gatherings. And also one of our family friends, dear family friends, Dr. Bill Turner is an historian on Blacks and Appalachia and the rich history behind that.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of your mother's side of the family, it's Indigenous, but different nations.
Martha Redbone:
That's right. So my grandpa came from Alabama, Mountville, Alabama, and his grandfather came from Mississippi. And so they are mixed white and Choctaw and Black. And on my mother's side, on my grandmother's side, my grandmother's family had been in Harlan County and in Lee County, Virginia for centuries, centuries and centuries. My fifth great grandfather fought in the war of 1812, and they are mixed Chicamauga Cherokee and white and Black. And so we are completely known, I guess, as the tri-racials of the region. And when you look at Indian removal and reclassification and the story behind Walter Plecker, who was the head of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, he was also a eugenicist. And so many of those states had this one drop rule, and it really affected Kentucky and Virginia and Tennessee where it began a systemic process of paper genocide.
Leah Roseman:
And what do you mean by that in terms of
Martha Redbone:
Paper genocide is when your identity is changed overnight on paper in the eyes of the government, they had implemented census taking census of the region because they wanted to make sure that Native Americans were completely eliminated from these areas. It was paper genocide, and not only were there physical genocide, but there was also genocide on paper for those who were mixed race. And so if you were a native person who was married to someone who was white, your race was changed. If you were married to someone who was Black, a native person who was married to someone who was Black, your race, you were changed, you were given a race and then you were removed. You can see it in my own family story where there are census rolls that say IND for Indian in these counties. And then 10 years later you'd see that they were MU, changed to MU mulatto, and then another decade later you would see COL for colored or B for Black. The same people and my family were, like I said, we were a coal family, we didn't have money, we didn't have a lot of money, and so you didn't really move very much because you couldn't afford to leave your place. So you can see how our identity was erased on paper overnight, but it doesn't really change who you are culturally. You are who you are and your family is who your family is.
Leah Roseman:
So Martha, when you started to dig in and do some of this research, this archival research, was it shocking to see the evidence?
Martha Redbone:
No, because it was known. We've known this in our family forever. I mean, we are multicultural families, so we've seen that. We know that because we always come home. What was interesting to see is not the archival research of our family, but the archival research of the history of that land, I found the most riveting and incensing, I guess you can, is that such a word where you just feel just livid with the injustice. And the, the very sad part about it is you dig deeper. You don't just go into your own family. You're looking at all kinds of other things. I mean, I found letters, they're available, they're all online. You can see these things in the national archives. You can look in all kinds of documents. You can go to the freedman's bureaus and all kinds of historical documents and see these things.
And it is really truly shocking when you look at the files. And what you do see at the end is the reason behind the erasure of so many Indigenous and Afro Indigenous people is the one drop rule. But the reason behind that erasure is poverty. Most of the people could not read or write, and therefore you were at the mercy of whoever filled out these forms. And then there, there's a book that talks about, there's a book called Indivisible, and you can find it online, indivisible, the Story of African-American and Native American peoples. And you can see how the systemic racism worked. And it is really, it just shows you the ugliness of legislature when commodification and money is access to resources is at stake and greed. So you can really see that. And as a songwriter, when you discover these things, you can choose easily to demonize a system of people, but it's much deeper than that. It goes much deeper than that. And so you look at, as a songwriter and a composer, you look at it in terms of all the angles. You try to address it from all the angles and see it for what it is and see it for the sorrow, the sadness, and also the absurdity of racism.
I just watched something the other day where someone said, if I cut my arm, Leah, if I cut my arm, and Leah, if you cut your arm at the same time, what comes out,
Our blood is exactly the same color. And so this is how someone who was, I can't remember, it was on a YouTube video, I think it was like a civil rights activist or something. And when they said that, you realize that we're human beings and it's our responsibility to recognize that we are human. And the story of the melanin is kind of, it means nothing at the end of the day. And so as a songwriter, I just try to address these things from as many angles as I can and to find ways of showing how humanity should be giving ideals and things to strive for and how to make things better and how things, yes, this is what has happened, this is the ugliness of what has happened, but look at how far we've come and look at what we can do moving forward to work together to make this world a place that our children's children will be able to tell stories. Yes, it was a terrible time, but my great grands work towards fixing that and look at where we are today. Do you see what I mean? And that's kind of how I look at it.
Leah Roseman:
And with that strand, Martha, I saw those beautiful videos you made for Carnegie for children, and I was interested in the intercultural influence in terms of call and response musically with the Black community and Indigenous. So yeah,
Martha Redbone:
The call, I love teaching social dances because the social dances of the Southeast are really wonderful because of the history of enslaved people and indigenous people in the region as well as people who were settlers. I think it's really important to share in a call and response style, which hearkens right back to Africa. It's a great way to teach children. It's a wonderful way to teach children just to follow songs. I think one of the things I just simply came to realize when we talk about singing folk music, when someone says folk music, people immediately think of banjos and fiddles and white people. If you say that was a folk music festival, but they don't understand that folk music is all folk. It's everyone who came to this land and they brought the music from their folk. They brought the music from Irish folk, from Scottish folk, from African folk, from Black folks from Indigenous folk, German folk, Portuguese. And this is the sound. The sound that comes from all of these people coming together in these various regions throughout the southeast is why we have this music. The music that we have in American roots music is not heard in other places. And the same people went to other regions all over this world. They brought Africans all over the world for work, for enslaved labor. They hit people over the head from Ireland and ship them to Australia for labor.
And there's a different type of music that comes out of there. So it's really important to understand what folk music means. And so when I use the call and response style, that's going back to my grandfather's people and also my great grandparents in Virginia and Kentucky. This is the music that they listened to that they would hear their grandparents sing. So I love that it's kind of translated to these children's projects.
Leah Roseman:
So we're going to be including some clips of your beautiful album, The Garden of Love. So maybe at this point, I was thinking the opening track,
Martha Redbone:
Yes
Leah Roseman:
it's so arresting and with the rattles, and so really powerful. Do you want to speak to that a little bit and then we'll include a little clip?
Martha Redbone:
Sure. The Garden of Love was really, that was a project that we made by happenstance, believe it or not. We made the decision to make a mountain record, mountain record because we were losing so many of our elders in our community back home. And I wanted a way to, and I realized that in our family, our little ones will not see photos and things, but not really capture the essence of what that region means and what that land means. And so once again, I do everything through music. And so my partner and husband, Aaron Whitby, who I do the majority of my collaborations with, we decided let's make this mountain record. So we started thinking of kind of songs, coal mountain, coal country songs and things like that, and old pioneer songs and those kinds of things.
And then Aaron said, Hey, what about, look at this anthology of William Blake's poetry that we have here on the shelf. He says, some of these look really cool. Let's have a look through these. So we looked through a bunch of them and we found so many that really resonated and painted the picture of very similar to England, rolling Hills and craggy mountains and climbing things and green pastures. And I thought, wow, this really resonates with Kentucky. Let's do that. So we ended up setting three of the poems and we said, well, look, we can't have all these different coal mining songs and kind of Appalachian folk songs and things like that. And then three William Blake poems, why three William Blake poems? It doesn't make any sense. And so we said, you know what? We're honoring Black Mountain. Let's just honor William Blake. And so we ended up doing a whole setting of all these different poems, and we still have more that we hadn't recorded (Music, clip of The Garden of Love)
And we ended up calling John McEuen from The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band who we'd become friends with and met with him, and we said, he's our guy. He would be the perfect person to capture this. So we demoed up a bunch of songs and then called up John and played it for him. And John absolutely loved what we did. He just loved the rawness of what we'd done. And then he added his incredible magic. He ended up just putting these beautiful arrangements on each of the songs, and we recorded in Nashville, and the rest is history.
Leah Roseman:
And John plays many instruments on this album.
Martha Redbone:
He's playing, I believe John is playing nine different instruments because that is John McEuen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious on, you have a special guest on a dream, David Amram. Do you know him personally?
Martha Redbone:
Yes. David Amram. David is a really dear friend of ours for, gosh, at least 20 years now, coming on 20 years. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
What a legend.
Martha Redbone:
Yeah, he's amazing. He is a dear friend. We just talked with him last week, I believe he's 94. He might be 94 now. He is wonderful. We're just talking about doing a show together in the fall. We're going to be working together in October.
Leah Roseman:
That's inspiring to hear.
Martha Redbone:
We play with him all the time. We do lots of different, we will come and sing a song at his birthday parties. He always has birthday concerts in the city, and he is a remarkable human being. Absolutely brilliant. Speaking of playing many, many instruments. He's wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Do you want to say a little bit about him? For people who haven't heard about him?
Martha Redbone:
David Amram is a wonderful American composer. I believe he was, I can't even give his bio, but you can Google him and find his bio. And he has done everything. He was also part of the Civil Rights movement. He was part of the beatnik movement with Jack Kerouac, and I have a whole stack of Jack Kerouac poems that he wanted. Aaron and I too, I mean, we're in our little studio here, and you see James Baldwin is our little blessing in the corner there. But he wanted us to do something with the Jack Kerouac poems, which we will. I'd like to get him on that too.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah, I worked with him many, many years ago, maybe 25 or 30 years ago. He came up and worked with our orchestra, and I think we had a book he'd written. I kind of knew, and some of his music and just his presence. It was really, really cool. Yes. And the last song on that album, Sleep, Sleep, Beauty Bright is such a beautiful lullaby.
Martha Redbone:
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, those poems, and I hate when I hear other people say this, but I realize that one day I'm going to have to say these phrase, A lot of those poems sang themselves. They really did. I mean, the majority of the poems were songs of innocence, songs of experience. So a lot of them were written in stanzas, clearly that he meant to sing. So I felt a lot of them just kind of flowed as we were reading them. And I love melody just being raised in Appalachia as a kid, a little kid. I felt like I just love melody. And I think that's the most beautiful part about the music of Appalachia. All the folk music coming out of there is, I think you get a sense of a strong sense of melody and storytelling. And when you look at all the greats, Dolly Parton and folks like that, that's what you hear in country music. You hear an incredible story and wonderful, memorable melodies. (Music clip of Sleep, Sleep, Beauty Bright)
Leah Roseman:
So Martha, your musical career took a bit of a turn, like a conscious turn at a certain point you were doing different music and then you decided to change.
Martha Redbone:
Yeah, I sang a lot of soul music and a lot of rhythm and blues, and I still do. It's still in all of my concerts. I also found that the music, these categories that people get paid a lot of money to box in also changed. You don't really hear a lot of live rhythm and blues music on the radio. You just don't hear that. You hear a lot of influences with hip hop. Hip hop has now become commercialized and has taken over an r and b sound. Maybe it's become, they even have something I believe called Urban Sound. And so I personally felt that I had a bigger, wider, broader story to tell and to share. And I don't really like being boxed into categories. I mean, I have a knee jerk reaction. It's probably because of my own family history. I don't really like having to stick to something. And I believe you life as an artist when you're an artist, part of being an artist is to explore and to push beyond the boundaries that are given. You're supposed to create art that makes people think about themselves and their own position in the world, and I want to honor that. And so I've always been, even as when I was singing like right on out soul girl music, it was still something, always something different because I had a different story to tell.
When Aaron and I were writers, songwriters signed with Warner Chapel music, we were sent a lot of artists to write and produce for. And I remember some of the folks at the publishing company would say, oh, if you want lyrics within, hey, we'll send a little pop girl over to work with us. If you want lyrics with integrity, oh, you got to go to Martha Redbone, so it won't be so much sexual innuendos. So many things were at that particular time. So it was these kind of lyrics with integrity. I remember them saying that. I thought, okay, sure. But I wanted to just always tell a bigger story, and I wanted to follow a root of honoring my artistic endeavors is the best way to put it. I didn't want any rules around me. And as you get older as an artist, you have different things that happen in your life that resonate, that you want to celebrate and that you want to share.
And then we became parents. I became a mother who knew that I was ever going to become a mother. I had no intention of becoming a mom. Sometimes I was one of the people on the airplanes when I saw people walk on with babies, I'd be like, oh, I hope they're not sitting next to us. And then they knew all these years later, I turned around and Aaron and I sat on the plane with our baby, and we're like, where are those people? But you change. You change, and you have to honor it. You have to honor it. You can't live in the past and stay in these tiny boxes that limit you in any way creatively, I think. And writing music for theater, which brought us to Bone Hill and Black Mountain Women. And we're working on these other pieces as well. Human puppet, an exploration through puppetry with Nehprii Amenii, and that's through the Chelsea Factory as well. And also she's working out of the Victory Theater in Broadway. And so we wanted to make music on a broader platform that told a bigger story, and it celebrates the arc of everything that we know that music. So from classical to blues to soul, to r and b, to folk, to rock to everything. And we can find ways to dig in deep without any boundaries of making music.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I just wanted to ask you about transmitting the culture of your ancestors and how you learned some of that growing up.
Martha Redbone:
My grandparents were very old fashioned. We never went anywhere. We weren't really allowed to do very much. They were quite strict, and they were old time. These were old traditional mountain people with that comes old traditional mountain, everything. My grandma cooked different foods that a lot of people didn't eat, other families that we knew in the area didn't eat. So things like what we called, we would call wild onions and eggs, for example. That's something that I guess that would be the equivalent to making, I guess scallions. It would be scallions and scrambled eggs together, mixed together, things like that. There was quilting, and it's interesting because when you're growing up with your grandparents, you don't have a label. This is just your family. So I was not being taught per se. You are native, you are Chickamauga Cherokee. We are. It's not a label like that.
You just exist. And these are, someone passes away. This is what you do. It's not because we are this. It was never given a label. It just was not that type of thing. I learned later, as a teenager being in New York City, my mom said, oh, this is what that is, because I didn't know. When we moved to our neighborhood, our neighborhood was Caribbean and Latino, mostly Puerto Rican and mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican and Caribbean people from the West Indies. And so I remember being the new girl on the block, and the girls, the Puerto Rican girls were asked speaking to me in Spanish. The Black girls were talking to me and playing jump rope. They taught me how to do double Dutch. And then the Puerto Rican girls came to me and they surrounded me, and they said, they speaking to me in Spanish.
And I had no idea what they were saying, and I still remember it to this day. And they said, do you speak Spanish? And I said, no, no, you're not Puerto Rican. Are you Dominican? And I didn't know what they were talking about. I'd never heard of these places. I'd just come from Kentucky. I never heard of these far away places. I said, no, I don't know. And they said, well, we don't talk to them. And they were talking about the black girls who were across the street. I was being friendly with both. We don't talk to them and they don't talk to us. So you're going to have to choose who you want to be with. You want to be with them, hang out with them, or you want to hang out with us. And it was one family of five girls, and I thought, wow.
I was surrounded and I had to make a choice. And I didn't know either of them. And so I ended up being an outsider because I thought, well, I'm not going to hang out with either of you then if that's the way you are, I don't want to be a part of it. So I got myself out of that. And I remember coming home when my mom came home from work, I said, mom, I said, are we Dominican? Are we Puerto? Are we Puerto Rican? And I said that when we sing our prayers at the funeral, I said, are we speaking Spanish? Is that Spanish? I did not know. And my mom was like, oh, no, no. And I was like, what? And I said, well, what is that? And she says, oh, no, that's our old language. And that's how I found out what that label was.
So it wasn't, you're not given this label of this is who you are, and this is the history of what happened and the removal and this kind. It was not that kind of thing. You would hear phrases, little phrases here and there for my grandmother might say, oh, yeah, well, that was on the Long Walk. Those people went on the Long Walk, or we're going to cross the mountain to this, or We're making this quilt, or we are doing this and we're singing this song. So it was like that. It wasn't given a label. I didn't really know what that was, per se. The songs that we were taught were just songs that you would hear. That's what happens before you leave the house. You sing a song. It's a particular song that you sing. And when people arrive or a baby is born, here's a lullaby that we knew that we always sing. It's just that kind of thing.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. That's beautiful.
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Tasha Warren, Shakura S’Aida, Chuck Copenace, Jah’Mila, and Vahn Black. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend? Thanks.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit towards your musical influences growing up, because you were with your maternal grandparents in Appalachia.
Martha Redbone:
Yes. As a kid in Harlan County, we had one radio station. So that's why we know everything. And it's interesting because a lot of our band members are also from the Midwest. They're from Chicago and Kentucky with Roots in Kentucky as well. And it's the same thing when you're in the Midwest or Minnesota. Some of our friends are, you had one major station that played everything. So we knew a Conway Twitty song, and we also knew Parliament Funkadelic because all these songs were played, and we knew Foreigner and 10cc and The Beatles. We knew everything. And on Sunday Sundays, they would play gospel music in the mornings. So we knew all of those hymns and the Blind Boys of Alabama and James Cleveland, choirs and local choirs from churches that were in the region and in the Tri-Cities. And so we knew that's how we grew up.
We had watched Heehaw on tv, and so we just had a really broad sense of what music means and musical styles. And I feel really grateful for, I mean, I also appreciate now that there are many different radio stations that you can just listen to the type of music that you want to hear. I think there's some joy in that as well. But growing up, you do in these small regions, you get spread of everything, which I think gives you a greater sense of appreciation of all styles of music. You don't have to like everything, but it's just part of what's inside of you subconsciously.
Leah Roseman:
We talked earlier about your work for Carnegie and teaching the social dances, these stomp dances. So were you dancing with your community? Was there any of that?
Martha Redbone:
No, no, no. These are songs my grandpa sang. These are songs that I picked up along the way. And in regions, no, it wasn't that. We were in a very small coal mining town, and my parents, my grandparents were very, very old fashioned. But in the region, you would hear, in our town, you would hear, and even now after supper, you'll hear somebody bring out a fiddle. You'll hear something like that, and someone will bring out a guitar, a banjo, or you'll hear people sing. But it wasn't these particular traditional social dances were just melodies that we sang as little kids.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. I was curious about the Indigenous aspect with the vocables, if that was something you were
Martha Redbone:
Hearing as a kid. No, vocables come from, my grandpa would sing a lot of different things, and they went hunting a lot, and you would hear them hollering certain things, and that meant what they caught. If they were able to catch squirrels, if they caught groundhog, if they went off and went fishing, there were all different things like that. And so just me being musical, I ended up just picking up these things along the way. And then working with other folks from the southeastern regions, I ended up learning and they taught me songs, and then I taught them, oh, well, that sounds similar to our work songs, or, that sounds similar to our dance songs. Oh, we had something that sounded like that. And then you end up kind of putting that together.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Do you think you have a pretty good musical memory?
Martha Redbone:
I do. That's pretty much the only thing I remember.Yes, yes.(Music On Anothers Sorrow)
Leah Roseman:
You spent your teens, it says in your bio, in pre gentrified Brooklyn. So what was Brooklyn like in those
Martha Redbone:
Years? Well, I came back from Kentucky into middle school, and my parents had split up for good. And we ended up moving to a new neighborhood that turned into one of the crack capitals of Brooklyn overnight. Within a two year period, it became extremely, extremely dangerous to live. And that was in the eighties. That was the kind of a crack epidemic that hit the cities, that hit all the cities across the country. And so that's why I called it pre gentrified. And at that time, that was just the beginning of gentrification. And I remember there was a family who we used to go to for after school, kind of like a babysitter thing. And I remember the woman saying, two men came to my door this morning when the babies were asleep, and they opened up a suitcase full of cash and said, we'll give you this money for your house.
And she said, she yelled at them, you get away from my door and don't you come back here again, or I'm going to call the police on you. So she said, and she kept saying, white people are coming to our door and trying to force us out and offering us cash and suitcases. White people are coming, and they're going to take our houses away from us. And she kept saying that with the parents who were picking their kids up. And I was sitting there waiting for my mom to pick me up, and I'm just listening to the story. And the parents who were picking her up, they thought that she was crazy. They just kind of looked at her and thought,
Okay. And so she was right. She was absolutely right because one of those days, it was a day off school for me, and some people came and knocked on the door and she says, oh, go and see who that is. And I opened the door to help her out, and they said, yes, we'd like to talk to you. And they said, can we leave you this card? And they were attorneys and said, oh, we'd like to talk to her. And she refused to come to tell them to go away. And eventually, that whole street, somebody bought the house across the street from her, and then their friends came and bought another house from another elderly Black person. And then slowly, the whole block ended up being bought out. And then in turn, we see the whole area completely changed.
So that's why I talk about pre gentrified Brooklyn. That area in Brooklyn had a lot of teachers, Black and Afro-Caribbean and Latino school teachers and writers in that area, and a lot of educators. And it was a lot of artists as well, who ended up getting pushed out and priced out and things like that. And the same story is happening today in Brooklyn. I mean, it seems like it's happening all over this country, really, but certainly in the cities. When you look at New York City, you definitely see that. You see the same thing in places in Chicago and Detroit and all big cities, what's happening.
Leah Roseman:
And Canada as well.
You have a new project honoring the work of bell hooks.
Martha Redbone:
Yes. Yes. That project came about through the Apollo Theater's New Works program. I was invited to be a cohort in, I believe, 2022, something like that, just coming out of COVID. And it might've been within the first year that bell hooks passed away, and I thought it would be a fun idea to set the words of bell hooks. We did it for William Blake. I thought it would be really cool to do that. And then I love the fact that she had a book of poems called Appalachian Elegy. I thought that was really important. And so we decided to work on that, plus a couple of other books we thought we would look at. And we ended up with pretty much just setting the poetry from Appalachian Elegy, including the prologue, one of her essays. And it ended up being a really beautiful, beautiful project. We not only got the blessing from her estate who take care of all of her works, but we also got the blessing from her sister Gwenda, who actually came to our workshop performance of the piece of the working piece.
And it was wonderful. We had all our folks from our friends from Hopkinsville, which is her hometown, and the Penny Royal Arts Council, who have been supporting her work, and her sister's a part of that, and they're building a learning center in her name. And it was just a really, really beautiful project. It ended up feeling like a kind of memorial or like a church or she has a poem where in the poem she uses, she talks about the journey of someone who is from this land, this region, who leaves their homeland for many years, and then the right to return to your homeland, and the reclamation of that, and then the conflicting emotions that you have returning to a homeland that has a very dark history of your erasure, of wars, of racism, of real dark ugliness. But still at the same time, you're conflicted because this is also the place where all of the people that you love are laid to rest.
So they're in this ground, which has all this darkness and this ugliness, but yet the beauty of all the people that you love still in here. And so she talks often in her poems about this giving the promise of resurrection that things will be renewed, very similar to William Blake of this kind of rebirth and renewal, and I love that. So we set that to some really amazing music that we will end up recording. Once we finish this piece. We're going to go back and we haven't premiered it yet. We we're actually still in development. But I love the response that we've been given so far has been really absolutely beautiful, beautiful. And we're looking for partners to help bring this to the next phase. We also had video projections from our dear friend, Atilio Regati, who's a wonderful filmmaker, and he does all of these animation and interactive things, and he's just absolutely brilliant. So we put these things together, but as we were doing the workshop, it ended up feeling like we actually resurrected bell hooks. Her spirit is alive in the room when we do these songs. So that was wonderful. It's a really fun project to do.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. You have another new project, another musical project with the Civilians Theater, The Sex Variants of 1941.
Martha Redbone:
Yes. That's a wonderful project as well. That's a musical. We worked with Steve Cosson, who was the artistic director of Civilians and who's also the co playwright. And Steven Trask, who was the composer for Hedwig and The Angry Inch is also our co composer team. So there's Steven, Aaron Whitby, my partner, and myself. So the three of us are making the music for this piece. We had a two week run at NYU Skirball last November, and now we're fleshing it out into a full musical. That's another one. That's a really interesting story. This is a book that was published in 1941 based on what they call case studies of homosexuals. At that time, they were, it was believed to be that gay people had a mental illness. And so a woman named Jan Gay set out to prove this wrong by interviewing a bunch of women.
And Jan Gay had her own story and success in Europe with, she was a nudist, and so she made a film, a short film, and had some success in Europe, and I believe in Germany. And so she thought it would be, she teamed up with another man named Thomas Painter who interviewed men, gay men. So she interviewed gay women. She interviewed 40 women, he interviewed 40 men, and they put together these case studies, and then someone else kind of took over. And it's basically the sex variance is the story of how this book was made. That's how it is. And what we've done as composers is we've, when you read this book, this book tells they're being interviewed, and you can tell that they're being asked the same questions. And then they're speaking each person, each individual is speaking in their own voice, in their own language, their own slang, whatever it is.
And they're telling their stories, and some of them are going back to when they were a child, and then this kind of thing, and then some stories of their first encounters. And they always knew that they were gay when they were three years old and five years old. And then these experiences through their lives, all different unique stories. And then the person who interviewed them made their own assessments. I mean, these were pretty harsh and objectifying, and really not nice, not good measuring their body parts and criticizing how whoever was interviewing them, criticizing how they felt the person looked. If a person was unattractive or something, they would put things like that. And so it was a really cold way of approaching people. And so we decided to make these people who were case studies, so quote-unquote "case studies", to turn them back into human beings with feelings and a heart and some vulnerability, and really listen to their words. So that's what we did, and that's what we're working on now.
Leah Roseman:
That sounds like a beautiful project. How did you come to it?
Martha Redbone:
We worked with The Civilians. We met Steve Cosson through Les Waters, who is our director at Black Mountain with Black Mountain Women at the Public, and The Civilians. He's worked with Civilians for many, many years, and they were honoring Les at their annual gala. And as we were working with Les with Black Mountain Women, they invited us to create a song based on interviews. It's investigative theater, The Civilians theater, based on interviews about Les. So they gave us these transcripts and we turned them into songs.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Would you be comfortable talking a little bit about your working relationship with Aaron because he's your partner in life and also creative partner?
Martha Redbone:
Absolutely. Absolutely. He's my dear husband, and I kind of gush about him all the time, and I had to stop doing it. I had to stop doing it because this world is such a funny world. Sometimes you get, it's an interesting thing when you're a woman in the business, if you're a woman, writer, composer, anything, and you have a male partner, people think you're only successful because of the male partner. You know what I mean? It's that kind of thing. The sexism really comes into play, the, oh, you can't do anything, or you can't, oh, so you do the lyrics and he does the music? No, we do both. Oh. But I can't tell you how many times coming up when I was younger, we'd be in the studio and everyone would just assume that I was this cute little girl in the corner just writing, apples are red, the leaves are brown in the fall, and then I'd go and sing, and that I was not the producer working on these decks and mixing and knowing exactly what we want and co arranging.
I never got the co part. People never understood the co part. So, but after so many years together, I mean, we've been a songwriting team for 32 years now. I'm kind of at this age, I'm in the Fuck you years. You don't get it. Fuck you, basically. And so now I, we work together. We work on separate projects, but we do mostly work together. And the reason that it's worked for 32 years is because we do have complimentary talents that we share and that it works. We are best friends. We've traveled through life together. Our birthdays are a day apart, which is fun. But he's a Londoner, born and raised Londoner, and I'm from Kentucky and Brooklyn, and we've been around a lot of decades, and we know a lot of music. Between the two of us. We probably can cover just about every style and genre a lot.
As you get older, you see a lot. Each decade brings you things We're like, oh, are we at the age where almost nothing surprises us anymore? When these things happen, certain things happen. But we musically, we just have always clicked. It's not that it's a walk in the park, it's not always easy. There's a lot of arguing and disagreeing, and we're passionate about what we feel works and what we feel doesn't work. But there is a mutual respect for each other. Creatively. The interesting thing is for us is we're such a unit as a duo that working with Stephen Trask or another person, which we've worked with many, many other collaboratives, collaborators, as many as five or six people writing songs and working on things. And one would think that we were locked in like this, but working with Stephen Trask on the sex variance has been, it's as if we've known each other as if the three of us have known each other since sixth grade, since middle school. Pretty much. It's just the easiest collaboration. We have so much fun. We laugh, we care, we change everything. It's just a really great combination.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah. So maybe to close this out, if you want to reflect a little bit, part of your life is definitely as a touring musician, which can be really challenging, do you have sort of advice for younger artists in terms of self-care or boundaries or how you manage
Martha Redbone:
That? Absolutely. For us, it may change because we do have an album that's coming out, and when you have an album specifically to promote, you have to work. If you have a booking agent who sends you on tour to many places, it all depends on who you're working with. But you do have to, number one, drink a lot of water because you don't always get the sleep that you need. So you have to drink a lot of water, and you have to remember to laugh. You have to remember not to take your selves too seriously because it's just music. It's not, I have to have wheat grass shots in my rider, and this fresh squeeze orange juice has to be on my thing, and I own must have yellow roses on my dressing room, and that is a bunch of bs. This is about making sure that the world in this crazy world of chaos that we're in, that your responsibility as a performer is to give the people who are investing in you by buying a ticket to your show, you are giving them as much love and care and an opportunity to forget about who they are just for the time of the show.
You take them to a place where they can just forget their troubles and be healed by the medicine that you're giving these people in whatever style it is. If you're playing the violin solo, that's your job to give joy and let people forget who they are, just for the time, the 90 minutes or whatever it is that you're on that stage. You're the doctor, you're a healer, you're an essential worker, and it's our responsibility to heal this world. And that's the main thing. My first, I said drink water, but I do have something that comes before that. If you're going to be a working musician, get up before noon. That's the first one, because mornings are really nice. Mornings are really beautiful and quiet. We get up. I have a dog, so we get up early every day, but getting up at six is really beautiful. It's a beautiful time to write. It's a beautiful time just to have your tea or your coffee and just sit and just have this quiet prayer, meditative time just to get your senses together. So carve out some time for that too. That's another really important thing.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. Well, thanks so much for this, Martha today. I really appreciated it.
Martha Redbone:
Thank you, Leah. Thanks for having me. It's a great, great show. Thanks so much.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
