Martha Redbone

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Martha Redbone is an Independent Music Award–winning musician of Cherokee, Choctaw, Shawnee, and African American descent. She explores traditional and modern variations of folk, roots, blues, tribal, and soul music. Since breaking onto the scene at the 2002 Native American Music Awards, she has earned a solid reputation as a sought-after collaborator, performer, educator, and mentor all across North America and abroad.  She established her career in London and New York City. Working with up-and-coming artists such as Shola Ama, a Brit Award winner (equivalent of the GRAMMY Award), or such legends as Redbone’s Ohio Players / P-Funk mentor Walter “Junie” Morrison, she and her London-born partner Aaron Whitby consistently provide essential direction and soulful support to knit track and artist into an indelible whole.

In 2012, Redbone launched Martha Redbone Roots Project, with the release of The Garden of Love: Songs of William Blake, a collection of eighteenth-century poems set to the music of Appalachia. It was produced by John McEuen, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band founder and multiple GRAMMY Award winner. Garden of Love garnered national radio attention with features on NPR’s All Things Considered with Robert Siegel; WNYC’s Soundcheck and New Sounds, hosted by John Schaefer; and Sirius Satellite.

In a brilliant collision of cultures, the powerful blues and soul singer Martha Redbone has recorded an album called The Garden of Love: Songs of William Blake, which was produced by John McEuen, of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In it, the mystical, humanistic words of the eighteenth-century English poet are fused with the melodies, drones, and rhythms of the Appalachian string-band music that Redbone absorbed as a child from her grandparents, in Black Mountain, Kentucky.

—New Yorker