Enjoy listening to a variety of Polecat Creek's music — from studio recordings to live music — as well as a few “Beautiful Star” songs written by Laurelyn Dossett. Plus check out a moment from N.C. Music Fest 2008.
Enjoy listening to some of Polecat Creek's recordings.
Want to hear what they sound like live?
Scroll down till you see “Polecat Creek” and click to hear them performing at April's MerleFest.
“Beautiful Star,” with music by Laurelyn Dossett, will return to Triad Stage.
Check out some music from the play.
Keeping the beat
View a slideshow of Polecat Creek — including Laurelyn Dossett and Kari Sickenberger — as they launch into three days of shows at MerleFest.
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Shape note singing
Enjoy some sights and sounds from the UNCG MusicFest 2008 shape note workshop.
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Shape Note Transcript
Shapes are a system of writing regular music, like you’d see in any church hymn book, and assigning a shape to them based on their position in the scale. A man would come through selling hymn books, collections of tunes, and sell his tunes to the town or to the church, sell his book. Part of the book was maybe a week of instruction of how to sing, on how to sight-sing specifically, and musicians will know what that means — learning how to read four-part harmony and sing an enormous variety of tunes. So it would take maybe a week to do. He would have classes in the day and try to teach each person what the shapes meant.
Fa is a triangle. Sol looks like a regular note, it's round. La is a rectangle. And Mi is a diamond. That simplified system is supposed to make it easier for people to learn quicker how to sight-sing.