A hefty pirate and two saucy trollops stop passersby on Elm Street.

“We're advertising for ‘Bloody Blackbeard.’ It begins June 8th.”

That's less than two months away.

At that moment Laurelyn Dossett '99 MS, the writer of the play's original music, is on stage as a headliner for Greensboro's Bicentennial Heritage Festival Weekend. It's a cool April evening, as blustery as a squall on the Outer Banks. It was much warmer when she and banjo player Riley Baugus tuned. But she's smiling. “We're going to start this in the key of D. It might end up as something else.”

That's how it is. You never know what the future may hold.

When she joined a reading group and discovered another woman, Kari Sickenberger '00 MALS, loved folk music too, who knew they'd ever perform publicly and go on to create the group Polecat Creek? That she'd win the Chris Austin songwriting competition at MerleFest? That one of her songs, about the loss of textiles, would end up on the front page of the Atlanta newspaper — and then be featured on Great Britain's BBC? That the artistic director of Greensboro's Triad Stage, Preston Lane, would be listening to the BBC that day and decide he wanted that songwriter to craft the music to an original play, “Brother Wolf”? That she'd do the same with Triad Stage's “Beautiful Star: An Appalachian Nativity”? That in their showing off “Brother Wolf” for New York producers, one of the play's songs would find its way onto a Grammy-winning CD?

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PICKIN' ON PIRATES Laurelyn composed the music for Triad Stage's “Bloody Blackbeard.” She also composed the music for “Brother Wolf” and “Beautiful Star.”

But this April weekend, there are still songs to write. When the weekend began, she had three more to go. “I'm in two-more-next-week mode,” she'd said.

She's out of her comfort zone. Those earlier plays had an Appalachian and gospel feel. She grew up with those sounds. Not this one. She's had to research and explore, to “hunt and peck” as she says, soaking up Caribbean music and Celtic reels and sea chanties. “I need to get it in a pirate language.”

What had she known about Blackbeard? “I didn't even know he was real. I thought it was like Paul Bunyan.”

She soon came to know more than most about the pirate who inspired terror from the Caribbean to the North Carolina coast. Ocracoke and Bath, where he knew the royal governor, were two of his old haunts.