SHCH Open Mic June 20!
This month we have our Open Mic on June 20, 2025, Sign up sheet opens 6:15, show starts 6:30. Write that down. Your hosts will be MC Top Hat and Susanna Tamborina. Be prepared to pull your lucky number out of a lucky top hat! Or maybe pull out a handsome Talking Frog Prince! (The Artist formerly known as Prince will definitely not be attending.)
Our poster this month features Martha Redbone, award winning composer, musician, and poet. Fusing Native American music with Blues and Soul, she has a sound unique to her. She composed the score to the hit 2022 Broadway play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff” with her composer Husband, and it soars.
A written tribute, along with links to her music, is available below. Of course MC Parker saw her live, made the crisp and beautiful poster, and will have an insightful tribute worth your time.
So come and see your talented Ballard musician friends, bands, singers, and poets. We have free admission to all, (membership suggested if you can) with snacks, treats, spring water, and “Aspirational French” soft drinks. Not actually a product of France, and I’m surprised they are not just full of nothing but French Alps mountain air. Refreshing!
And for all of $5.00 you can have more of the beautiful Landmark Party wines from Molly’s Bottle Shop, crisp fresh crafty beer, and the best NA beers available. Please come and hear some fun music, some daring musicians maybe on a slide (guitar) and have a plate of fresh healthy Caprisé sandwiches and not just Oreos for dinner as usual.
Tribute to Martha Redbone
Parker Gambino – June 12, 2025
“Redbone” is a term sometimes applied to a person of mixed Native American and African-American ancestry. Whether or not it is the surname appearing on Martha Redbone’s birth certificate matters little to me, it is firmly, proudly, and assertively her identity. Martha’s life has been a series of scene changes, and of invitations and acquisitions. From these she has synthesized an awesome blend of creativity that does not recognize boundaries between music, authorship, drama, scholarship, history, activism, and education. And she accumulates without any exclusionary inklings the diverse fellow-travellers who are part of the creation and projection of her vision. Her close musical collaborator Aaron Whitby is also her husband, who also performs independently from Martha’s juggernaut with his “Cousin From Another Planet” group. He’s actually not from that far away, just from England.
Martha’s earliest days were in rural Kentucky, where the typical coal-country audio exposure tended towards acoustics: old-timey, folk, blues, country, and gospel genres, and where some of her family roots extend back into the 18th century. In her teen years a family relocation to Brooklyn was an abrupt culture shift, providing a whole other palette of musical influences to be mined, a bit more electric and funk-oriented. Some connections to the Ohio Players and Parliament Funkadelic stables didn’t hurt! Even as an elevated attention to Native American musical threads seeped into her gumbo, the urban environment also opened up a world of opportunities for collaboration with artists of the theatre and beyond, leading to more complex fusions of vision.
As evidence of the futility of pigeon-holing Martha, the title of the 2012 album, “Martha Redbone Roots Project – The Garden of Love – Songs of William Blake” would seem to indicate veering in a head-scratching direction. But instead, as reviewed by Steve Newman, it “frequently makes the listener feel as if these lyrics were somehow written with this music and this singer in mind.”
The appropriation of the poems/songs of ahead-of-his-time visionary Blake (I’m guessing he would have approved), stuning as it is, seems like a warmup for Martha’s subsequent “Bone Hill” project. I was fortunate to attend a sort of run through in the course of the development of this interdisciplinary opus. Inspired by the history of Martha’s mother’s family, it recounts the experiences of four generations of Native American women, shaped by struggle against racism and marginalization. But there is also perseverance, dignity, and grit, and an embrace of the strength of family bonds which, if they cannot add a dimension of joy to a hard ilfe, they at least bolster the will to keep on keepin’ on, there being no other choice. It’s a tour-de-force for Martha, who inhabits various characters in succession, amidst the weaving of musical interludes. As she describes it, “It’s really about how the family holds onto the culture despite all of the laws and things that come in that threaten to extinguish us and erase our history and erase who we are as a people.” The intensity of presentations of the full-blown production, and the universality of its themes are evident in the post-performance comments and conversations with theatre-goers, regardless of ethnic or racial background, who are eager to share their own family history tales of struggle, alienation, and woe.
As with other artists who help us to acknowledge and come to terms with the wrong steps in our past, Martha understands the value of an education mission, and has participated in designing and implementing curriculum for school groups. She sweeps up accolades from the usual suspect institutions, honoring her dedication to channeling complexity into something that transcends art. She’s still actively touring and promoting, interpreting and testifying with passion and soul whether her backup is the full-blown band, one or two accompanists, or none, as she can hold her own with powerful engaging stage presence and that soulful voice. Hand percussion is ubiquitous, as featured in this month’s portrayal.
sketches and reviews on my website:
Deep-dived review of “Garden of Love” album by Steve Newman, Blake Issue Archive
WGNU (Denver Public Radio) Interview
Music
My Life as a Musician in Black and Red
Garden of Love – At City Winery