Longwood Debut
Vocalist, songwriter, composer, and educator of African American, Cherokee, and Choctaw descent, multi-award-winning musician Martha Redbone broadens the boundaries of American roots music with songs and storytelling that share her life experience as a Black and Native American woman navigating the new millennium. Celebrated for her tasty gumbo of roots music embodying the folk and mountain blues sounds of her childhood in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky and Brooklyn, Redbone inherited her powerful gospel-singing father’s voice and the resilient spirit of her mother’s Southeastern Indigenous culture.
A 2021 United States Artist Fellow, Redbone also works in partnership with longtime collaborator/husband Aaron Whitby. Their works give voice to issues of social justice, connecting cultures, and celebrating the human spirit. Her album The Garden of Love: Songs of William Blake (produced by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band founder and Grammy Award winner John McEuen), is “a brilliant collision of cultures” (The New Yorker).
Redbone and Whitby are the composers, arrangers, and orchestrators of original music and score for the 2022 Broadway revival of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuff, the 1976 classic choreopoem by the late Ntozake Shange, premiering at the Booth Theater and garnering seven Tony Award nominations and critical acclaim. Redbone and Whitby are also the 2020 Drama Desk Award recipients for Outstanding Music in a Play and the 2020 Audelco Award recipient for Outstanding Composer of Original Music and Score for the off-Broadway revival.