At Friday night’s kickoff for Hopkinsville’s Big Read, musician Martha Redbone told stories about her family’s Native, African American and Appalachian heritages and how they fit in Kentucky.
Her songs and stories were at times thought-provoking, heartbreaking, instructive, sad and hilarious.
Growing up in Harlan — where her grandfather was a coal miner and her great-grandmother descended from Native Americans who defied the U.S. government’s efforts to permanently erase tribes from the southeastern states — Redbone lived the complex truth of many American families. We don’t fit into neat categories. We are not only one thing and never another.
In one humorous song, Redbone described how census-takers shifted decade to decade in their attempts to label her family by race.
Redbone has said that the narrative unfolding in her performance of “Bone Hill: The Concert” could be a “bird’s eye view” into any family’s story.
The show was an appropriate entry into our community’s shared reading of “There There.” The novel’s Native American characters must deal with a sense of both belonging and not belonging in the United States.
Like all of the 30-plus events planned around Big Read through November, the Redbone concert was free. Here’s a schedule of the Big Read events.
This week’s lineup includes Poetry & Pints, which Hoptown Chronicle is co-sponsoring with WKMS. It’s at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Hopkinsville Brewing Co.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
