This free event is part of the Levitt on the Lawn concert series presented by Pasadena’s Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts and sponsored by alumna Elizabeth Levitt Hirsch ’74. Since 2005, Levitt on the Lawn has brought twenty diverse musical performances to the Scripps College campus. The twenty-first event will feature the Martha Redbone Roots Project.
Martha Redbone‘s music flows equally from her own unique, award-winning blend of Native American elements with funk and her deep roots in Appalachian folk and Piedmont blues. The Roots Project is Redbone’s tribute to her heritage and reflects a deep communion with the spirits of her ancestors. Her music resonates with the influence of her southeastern roots, echoing an earlier time/space through elements of folk, country gospel, stomp chants, and the high lonesome of a front porch Sunday pickin’.
Alongside her career as a recording artist and songwriter Redbone has maintained a steady involvement with causes she believes in, including an annual Traditional Music Workshop within the United Houma Nation’s Cultural Enrichment Summer Camp program teaching grade school age children the music from her Choctaw and Cherokee heritage as well as incorporating the tribe’s own Houma-French language. She has also given talks on subjects ranging from Indigenous People’s rights to the role of arts in politics and on Native Identity. Her album “Skintalk” is part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian as an example of contemporary Native American music. She is featured in NMAI’s current exhibit “Up Where We Belong- Native Americans in Popular Culture”.
The concert begins at 5:30pm on the Bowling Green at Scripps College. Dinner will be available for purchase on the lawn (Claremont Colleges students, faculty, and staff may use their meal cards; all others $9.00), though picnic dinners are also welcomed. For more information, call the Malott Commons Program Office at (909) 607-9372.