Martha Redbone Roots Project

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Sunday Apr 28 1:30 PM

Fais
Sunday Apr 28 4:55 PM on Cultural Exchange Pavilion

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MARTHA REDBONE Martha Redbone is one of our time’s leading contemporary Native American voices beloved by music connoisseurs and recognized by the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian who have collected and presented her work. Redbone’s music flows equally from her father’s North Carolina gospel legacy proudly on display in her unique, award-winning blend of Native American elements with soul and funk on her previous recordings and her deep roots in Appalachian folk and Piedmont blues favored by the matriarchy that raised her on a rich sojourn from Clinch Mountain, Virginia to Harlan County, Kentucky and beyond to Brooklyn’s Dodge City-esque mean streets. Indeed, The Garden Of Love-Songs of William Blake seamlessly evokes the mid-20th century old timey gold rush when such artists as her fellow Kentuckians Jim Ford and Jackie DeShannon fearlessly infused their downhome blues between canyon air ballets and retronuevo cabinessence – before their followers developed newgrass and Redbone’s twangy forebears Buffy Sainte-Marie and Rita Coolidge brought Indigenous concerns to the rock & roll arena in the 1970s. It may come as a surprise to some that Redbone, noted for purveying the wilder shores of rhythm & blues on prior releases Home of the Brave and Skintalk, recorded her new album in the fabled center of country music, Nashville. Yet, proudly retracing the path of her uniquely American mixed heritage back to its earliest source, she is merely taking the inevitable next step of a maverick artist who has never been chained by borders. Americana is her natural homecoming, sonic and otherwise. On her new album The Garden Of Love - Songs of William Blake Redbone takes the immortal words of poet William Blake, the great Romantic visionary from 18th century England, and sets them in the Appalachian Mountains, bringing her uniquely soulful voice to hollered melodies, lullabies, ancient chants and inspired hymns. The result, produced by Grammy Award-winning Nitty Gritty Dirt Band founder John McEuen and David Hoffner, is a wondrous folk, country, gospel and blues reading in which the songs feel like timeless mountain classics with lyrics that are startlingly fresh and strikingly relevant. The Garden Of Love is being met with international love and acclaim. As Vernon Reid praised, Martha Redbone interpreted the “hauntingly lovely words of William Blake with the power of a storm & the gentleness of a breeze.” The album is receiving considerable airplay across the country and in Europe, while riding high on Billboard’s Folk, Heatseekers and Amazon.com’s Best-Selling Hot New Folk Releases. Redbone is a mesmerizing and dynamic live performer delighting audiences everywhere and is now building a national radio presence including a recent interview on NPR’s All Things Considered with Robert Siegel, WNYC’s Soundcheck and New Sounds, hosted by John Schaefer and will be a featured performer on Bob Edwards’ and Mary Sue Twohy’s Sirius Satellite Radio shows in 2013. (Kandia Crazy Horse) "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." THE NEW YORKER

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