Betty Benedeadly makes music for the space between a desert highway and a carnival midway. She calls it psychedelic spaghetti western. It is music with twang, atmosphere and a taste for the surreal, but the songs are only part of the experience. Betty builds a world around them, one populated by odd narratives, strange messages and theatrical turns.
“Making music is different than putting on a show,” she says.
That distinction is important. A Betty Benedeadly performance is immersive and quirky, less a conventional concert than an invitation to enter her peculiar headspace. The music can feel like a soundtrack for a lonely stretch of New Mexico road, with the sun dropping behind the mountains and something inexplicable waiting beyond the headlights.
The story begins in Wisconsin, near Baraboo, where Betty grew up in the vicinity of the House on the Rock. Alex Jordan’s sprawling creation, filled with collections, mechanical wonders and obsessive oddities, became part of the imaginative landscape around her. So did the circus. When her family moved to Sarasota, Florida, Betty found herself in another great circus town. At Sarasota High School, students could letter in circus arts, taking part in trapeze, clowning and acrobatics.
But Betty was, by her own description, a hard-science nerd.
She studied biochemistry as an undergraduate and earned a master’s degree in science communications. Then, after graduate school, she realized she had little interest in pursuing the conventional career those credentials suggested.
The circus had already gotten under her skin.
She joined a carnival that toured rural Wisconsin and spent the summer learning the peculiar education of the midway. Afterward, she moved to Austin on a one-way ticket and began street performing and busking, breathing fire and doing human blockhead acts on Sixth Street.
“I got bored hammering nails into my nose and moved on to experimenting with guitar,” she says.
It sounds like a joke, but it also explains something essential about Betty. She is forever following the next obsession.
One night in Austin, broke and carrying a hammer and nail, she started entertaining people in a food court. Someone bought her food. Then people began throwing money. She realized she had discovered a survival skill that required neither laboratory nor office.
“I will always get by,” she says. “I want to entertain in some capacity.”
That impulse toward performance never disappeared. Neither did the circus.
Betty spent time interviewing contemporary sideshow and freak-show performers and became deeply immersed in the history of the form. The attraction was not merely spectacle. She was fascinated by people who built lives outside the usual boundaries, the same quality she recognized in the eccentric world surrounding the House on the Rock.
Her grandfather, Florio Benedetti, known as “Big Band Ben,” gave her another connection to performance. A longtime Madison radio personality and emcee, he was a storyteller with a vast record collection—roughly 20,000 albums at its peak. Betty remembers a basement lined with shelves of records and a grandfather who seemed to know exactly where everything was.
He loved country music, big bands and the personalities who passed through Madison. Betty credits him with giving her a love of music, storytelling and the ease required to stand before an audience.
Her own relationship with the West came later. She did not grow up steeped in Western movies or cowboy culture. Instead, she became fascinated by the West as mythology — a collection of symbols and stories available for rearrangement.
“I am attracted to music cerebrally and music as cultural, symbolic building blocks to play with,” she says.
That helps explain her connection to Ennio Morricone. The Italian composer approached the American West from the outside, absorbing its mythology and transforming it into something unmistakably his own. Betty recognizes that distance. She, too, came to the Western tradition without having inherited it as family folklore.
Her approach is less imitation than experimentation. Western music, country music, surf rock and psychedelia become materials on the workbench. She can take the familiar silhouette of the cowboy and send it somewhere strange.
The result is music that seems to shimmer in the heat. There is dust in it, but also neon. A lonely guitar line can suggest an empty road; a strange arrangement can make the landscape feel suddenly enormous. The desert becomes less a backdrop than a state of mind.
New Mexico, naturally, suits the project. Betty says she is finding towns that respond to the psych-western nerve she is touching. It is a good place for it. Here, the landscape already possesses the qualities her music pursues: hard sunlight, long shadows, distant mountains and wide stretches of country where the imagination has plenty of room to wander.
On Sept. 12, Betty Benedeadly brings her psychedelic western music and immersive media to the Rio Grande Theatre in Las Cruces. On Sept. 18, she and the Betty Benedeadly Band appear at Whiskey Creek Zocalo in Silver City as part of the Rare Skies Festival and fall equinox celebration. Expect guitars, strange stories, theatrical surprises and a little desert dust in the air. Betty, after all, has never been one to follow the expected route.
