Honky-tonk
Whitetop Mountain, Virginia
Martha Spencer is a singer-songwriter, mountain musician, and dancer from Grayson County in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She comes from a musical family and has been immersed in old-time traditions both at home and in her community from the time she was born. Her father was renowned old-time fiddler Thornton Spencer; her mother is banjoist, singer, and teacher Emily Spencer; and her uncle was the highly-influential luthier and musician Albert Hash. As a child, Martha soaked up the music and culture that was everywhere around her and learned to play several instruments by ear (guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, dulcimer, mandolin) as well as flatfoot and clog.
Martha is now one of Southwest Virginia’s most cherished traditional artists who plays and tours with several different band configurations, including the Whitetop Mountain Band, which her family has comprised for three generations and is still a favorite of dance halls and concert stages throughout the region. When not teaching or jamming, Martha has played and fronted a seemingly endless number of bands and musical collaborations, including Spencer Branch with her brother Kilby, the Blue Ridge Girls, the Whitetop Mountaineers, and Larry Sigmon and the Unique Sound of the Mountains. Along the way Martha has released numerous critically acclaimed albums as a solo artist, and her most recent project Wonderland draws from her many musical influences, leading the listener through a magical musical landscape via old-time Appalachian tunes, Django jazz, bluegrass, country, American songbook-style tunes, and ambling blues. “There is not a note out of place on Wonderland,” No Depression Magazine writes, “and the music evolves organically. The 16 songs on the album—a combination of originals and covers of traditional songs and songs by others—are little masterpieces of vocal and instrumental genius.”
Martha will perform many songs from her new release with what she has come to call the Wonderland Band, where she is joined by Jamie Collins on vocals and bass, Lucas Pasley on fiddle and banjo, and Jake Dwyer on various forms of percussion and dance. The Wonderland Country Band has already toured across the USA from California to Nashville where they performed at the Topanga Banjo Fiddle Festival, Buck Owens Crystal Palace, the Oklahoma Banjo Museum, and Song of the Mountains on PBS among others. The band recently piled into Martha’s vintage Wonderland Camper to travel north of the border to delight audiences at the Northern Lights Festival in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and are eager to showcase their musical renderings of Martha’s expansive creativity back home for friends in Virginia on the CCV Stage.