The singer-songwriter brings her theatrical song cycle ‘Bone Hill’ to Denver’s Newman Center

It’s not often one hears of musical influences quite as diverse as those of Martha Redbone. But the Native and African-American singer-songwriter, composer and educator was born and raised in rural Kentucky and later in her childhood ended up in Brooklyn, NY. Those places — and the music she heard there — are just the beginning of the “musical gumbo” that defines her work. It all culminates in the song cycle Bone Hill, which she’ll perform Sept. 25 at the Newman Center at the University of Denver.

In an interview with OnStage Colorado from her home in Brooklyn, Redbone described how the work over her long career was formed from childhood.

“I was raised in Kentucky by my grandparents, and back then we just had one radio station,” Redbone says. “They played all different types of music — rock ‘n’ roll, country, soul, gospel — you head whatever was happening.”

After moving to New York to be with her mom, she was listening to mega-rock stations like WPLJ and hearing music from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Rush, the Stones and more. Turn the dial to the Black station WBLS and that was a whole other universe of music she heard as a kid.

TV, too, made its mark.

“We’d watch TV back then and there were all these variety shows, which also had a wide mix of musical styles we were exposed to.”

The band backing her for Bone Hill is equally at home with a robust musical mix.

“My group is made up of people who can say we know every word to a song by Conway Twitty as well as all of the lyrics to songs by Parliament Funkadelic,” she laughs. “I feel really lucky to have that access.”

Martha Redbone | Photo: Craig Bailey

The road to ‘Bone Hill’

These days, Redbone has a collaborator who’s very close to her — her husband Aaron Whitby. Waving at the array of audio equipment behind her, she says they never really stop.

“We’ve been working together as a team for many, many, many years,” she says. “And I think the beauty of our collaboration is we have complementary skills. So, we never grow tired of it. It’s what we do.”

Adding to her many influences is the fact that Whitby is from London.

“Between the two of us, we have probably one of the broadest vocabularies of musical styles that there is. So, it’s been really wonderful to have met someone who’s a kindred spirit in that way.”

For much of her career, Redbone says they were focused on writing and performing shorter songs.

“There’s a lot you can say in a three-minute song, something you could get on the radio,” she says. “But after doing that for so many years, we felt that it would be really fun to explore a broader platform in theatre to express storytelling and song.”

And that impulse, she says, led to Bone Hill. Redbone describes it as a song cycle that’s also a theatrical concert — a one-woman show with a band with a lot of storytelling.

“It’s really lively and very moving and beautiful,” she says. “I’m really proud of the journey that we’ve had to get it here and I’m really excited to bring it to Denver.”

At least part of what drove the creation of Bone Hill, she says, was the desire to describe a type of American who defies clear categorization.

“Oftentimes when you’re from a very remote place, people just don’t know who you are or don’t know the lay of the land or the culture that lies within all these little pockets of America,” she says.

For Redbone, her identity includes experiences as someone with an ethnic and geographic history that, while somewhat atypical in the specific mix, is not at all unusual in this country.

“Think of most of America, no one is pure anything,” she says. “And that’s one of the things that I really chose to highlight in my journey as an artist and as a person navigating this world.”

From an early age, she says, people are always asking “where she’s from.”

“And I’ve lived in Europe, in London where people thought I was maybe French, and people I met in France thought I was from Brazil or in the Caribbean they thought I was Jamaican and so I thought, ‘Whoa! People need to know who we are and where we come from, where I come from.’”

Racial constructs in general, she says, don’t mean as much as people think they do.

“Calling someone White or Black or Asian or whatever, that’s not real either because every White person I know is some mix — Irish or Scottish or German, you know?”

The ‘Bone Hill’ mix

For Bone Hill, Redbone will mostly be singing, but also storytelling and portraying different characters.

“I’m going through the generations of the women in my family mostly, she says. “And I also play all kinds of little snippets of part of the historical context within the generations as we move on through the times and as the world starts to change around us.”

Audience members at the Bone Hill show will also hear a musical medley from far and wide. As Redbone says, there will be some traditional songs from the Kentucky mountains of her youth as well as blues, gospel, country, rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, soul  and funk.

“It’ll just be a lot of fun,” she says.