With the upcoming release of the self-titled album from the Charlottesville, Virginia, band Ramona and the Holy Smokes, you’d expect a conversation with the group’s frontwoman to center on the music. Ramona Martinez is eager to share the songs from her debut project, but her body language lights up with joy over the topic of faith.
Religious Roots
“Talking about God is my favorite thing, period,” she says. “And it’s weird to be a person of faith that isn’t a fundamentalist.”
Martinez’s background as a “third-culture” kid gave her a unique perspective on the world, especially concerning religion. Her dad is a musician, a Mexican American who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, home of the legendary Tejano icon Selena Quintanilla. Her mom worked in the U.S. Foreign Service, which required the family to relocate internationally every couple of years.
“My family went to whatever English-speaking church there was,” she said, reflecting on the transitory nature of her childhood. “I attended a Baptist church when we were in Tokyo. I’ve been a part of Lutheran churches. But we were mainly Episcopalian.”
A split within the worldwide Anglican Communion when Martinez was young was a pivotal moment in her journey. “That was wild,” she said, “and was when 12-year-old me was like, ‘I think all this church stuff is bullshit and God isn’t real.’”
Unite the Right
That slowly changed in her mid-20s when she moved to Charlottesville and walked into an Episcopal church with beautiful architecture and a choir she found mesmerizing. Martinez felt the presence of God through that church and began to dip her toes back into Episcopalianism.
“And then August 12 happened,” she said. “When the Nazis came.”
Martinez was referring to the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that drew hundreds of white supremacists representing various groups from around the country. The rallygoers sought to bring disparate organizations into a unified white nationalist movement. The event resulted in the death of Heather Heyer when a rallygoer drove his vehicle into a crowd of peaceful protesters.
In the aftermath, Martinez had a revelation.
“I noticed that a lot of faith leaders were putting their bodies on the line to protect protesters,” she said. “I then started to learn about liberation theology.”
Mother of God
This led her to another Episcopal church, one that was more reflective of the economic and racialized makeup of her community. It was here that she was introduced to the biblical text that now animates her faith, Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).
Martinez recites the canticle with the fervor of a revolutionary. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she exclaims with her fist in the air. “My spirit rejoices in God for he has struck down the mighty and lifted up the lowly; he’s filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty!”
“I realized,” Martinez continued, “that Christianity is this incredibly anarchist religion and how much change has been made in our culture because of people who practice a faith that proclaims what the gospel actually teaches.”
A tin whistle teacher in the Catskills helped her further explore the spirituality around the Virgin Mary. This led her to praying the rosary and, eventually, converting to Catholicism. She has, however, retained a very Protestant approach to her Catholic faith.
“I was already functionally Catholic,” Martinez said. “I was going to Mass but felt like I couldn’t convert because I didn’t agree with a lot of the political history of the Church. And then I realized, the Catholic Church isn’t just the people in charge, but the people who make up the church. And there needs to be more people who believe in liberation theology in the church.”
She joked that “I stopped going to Mass now that I’m Catholic.” That, however, is due to a more intense traveling schedule for her band.
Songs from God
The conversational pivot from religion to the album may seem unnatural to some, since she doesn’t sing faith-based music. But for Martinez, who has sung or played instruments in bands since she was a teenager, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. It is all spiritual to her.
In 2021, she began writing a massive wave of songs. “Believe it or not,” she said, “that is also connected to the Virgin Mary.”
“I had this narrative going on in my head for a long time that I was bad at writing verse,” she said. “But I became more interested in trying again. I was in Maine around a lake for a week and thought, ‘I’ll try to channel a poem, and maybe it’ll be from Mary or Jesus. I won’t judge, I’ll just let it come.’”
The result read like instructions from the Divine to a prophet:
Go to the place I send you
And do not ask why
Simply place one foot
In front of the other
And move forward with courage.
I will clear the way
I will light your path
I will never let you get lost.
You are already there,
And going there,
In the safety of my heart
And hands.
The Jukebox is Playing
This opened up a wave of songs that came to Martinez. She said, “It felt sometimes like they would just drop. I would sit down to write and would finish a couple of songs within an hour.” She refers to the more than 30 songs she wrote in a year as her “honky tonk angels.”
For those unfamiliar with the history of traditional Country and Western music, the reference is to a 1952 Kitty Wells song, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” The song was a response to “The Wild Side of Life,” by Hank Thompson, which was a letter to a wife who had left the narrator.
Wells’ sly tune exhibited a form of latent feminism brewing under the surface of 1950s patriarchy. It gives a wink and a nod to the power of a woman to determine her own destiny and to subvert the powers who seek to control her. It is, one might say, a sort of magnificat set in western dance halls.
The ten songs on Ramona and the Holy Smokes simultaneously remain faithful to traditional Western sounds while also infusing Martinez’s unique blend of “third-culture” sensitivities. If a comparison must be made, the sounds of Midland come to mind, honoring the sounds of the past while forging new paths.
In “Esta Herida,” Martinez leans into her Mexican-American heritage, where the pedal steel meets string guitars, with sonic nods to Buck Owens and Johnny Rodriguez. The song is sung mostly in Spanish. Although Martinez didn’t grow up speaking Spanish, her family believes she sings in Spanish better than in English, and she agrees.
Martinez notes that Jesus even makes a cameo in the hard times western swing tune “Down and Out.” She explains, “I love the idea of Jesus helping you win in poker, because it’s the positive outcome of holding out for a miracle in a high-stakes situation.”
Martinez said, “I wrote that song when I was really broke, which is often the case. I wasn’t thinking about liberation theology or class consciousness when I wrote it. But I knew that I was broke, and I also knew that God had me. God has given me over 40 songs and friends in a band, and somehow, that makes my path clear.”
Ramona and the Holy Smokes will be released on all streaming platforms on September 26, 2025.
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