Laurelynn Dossett: A "Beautiful Star"

She's alone out here, excepting June and her friend and fellow songwriter Molly McGinn, who keeps a camper on the property. Dossett looks at home. Wearing a denim jacket, a black turtleneck and hoop earrings, she fits with the rustic decor of her house. Her acoustic guitar leans against the wall.

When she plays and sings on her records, her voice is clear, with just enough of a twang to give credit to her Alabama birthplace. It's not an understatement to call Dossett one of the most important and influential members of this generation of roots musicians: her songs have been covered by both Levon Helm and by her good friend and frequent collaborator Rhiannon Giddens.

She doesn't like to play by herself, whether it’s sitting at home and writing new songs or getting up on a stage. She does, especially now that COVID-19 has taken away most of her opportunities to perform, but she feels most comfortable when she's working with others on one of her numerous musical projects.

"It just feels very egocentric," Dossett said. "And it's boring, you know, to me, and so I assume if I'm bored, that the audience is also bored. But from the feedback I get, apparently it's not boring to people, because people seem to like it."

It has been a circuitous path for Dossett to become the matriarch of North Carolina's hard-to-define music scene of roots and traditional folk musicians — "acoustic music rooted in tradition" as Dossett's friend and legendary bluegrass performer Alice Gerrard dubs it. The soon-to-be 60-year-old Dossett didn't even start playing music seriously until she was in her late 30s.

"It was totally unintentional," Dossett said. "I have an undergraduate degree in psychology, I have a master's degree in counseling. I worked in counseling. Mostly for big swaths of time I was just home with my children. I worked for a few years in counseling, but the music, I was compelled to do it. And we were having some success with it. And so I just did that thinking, 'Well, I'll just do this for a few years, and then I'll go back and get a real job.'

“And then that never happened.”

The path that Dossett walks has gone to all sorts of places and types of music; there was the album-making and touring with her first band, Polecat Creek, which she started with her friend Kari Sickenberger in 1997. Then her quasi-residency with the Triad Stage regional theater where she wrote music for six "plays-with-music," including the widely-acclaimed "Brother Wolf" and "Beautiful Star: An Appalachian Nativity" based in the lore and history of central North Carolina and its musical traditions.

There were the several years of hosting the “Songs of Hope & Justice” performances at the North Carolina Folk Festival. Right now, she's working with the Blue Ridge Music Center for its 10-part series, "A Place in the Band: Women in Bluegrass & American Roots Music," interviewing famous female musicians about their experiences.

There's a common theme filled with all the projects in her career — they all give her the opportunity to spend her time collaborating with other people.

In conversation, Dossett's friends and colleagues like to paint her as caring and gentle while still being forcefully driven.

Perhaps the best analogy for Dossett is that of a mother hen, politely nudging the other artists around her to grow into themselves, whether that's the musicians under her care at Triad Stage or her frequent collaborators.

"I never had a lot of ambition," Sickenberger said. "And so she helped me kind of create some ambition for myself, and help validate my deserving of, you know, the little bit of recognition that we got, and even just making a record seemed so ambitious to me. And then we wound up making three!"

Dossett’s gift with crafting clear characters within her songs is evident on the soundtrack for "Brother Wolf" — a play based on Beowulf set in Appalachia — and "Leaving Eden," a song Dossett wrote after the last textile mill closed in Eden, N.C., in the early 2000s.

"It's, like, you listen to that song (“Leaving Eden”), and you're like, 'I know that person, I know that character,'" said Emily Scott Robinson, a musician and Greensboro native who grew up with Dossett's children. "I can see that in my mind. I've met people like that, even though that song is a little bit like, it has kind of has an ageless quality to it. It's older, but it's still relevant."

Robinson, a country-folk artist who was named one of Rolling Stone’s “10 New Country and Americana Artists You Need to Know” has kept in close contact with Dossett as she started her own music career in Colorado.

"Her lyrics for songwriting really influenced me in terms of trying to capture the voice and the visceral experience of a character, that was important to me," Robinson said.

Dossett's influence expands beyond her artful songwriting and storycrafting. For many women, she is an example of a different way to go about being a professional musician.

"She was not deficient in any aspect of her life," McGinn said about the time when she first met Dossett. "She was giving to the community. Coming from where I thought, that a musician could only live on the road, lonely and rambling for the rest of their lives, here, she was, like, very stable, very nurturing, had a home base, and yet really doing a lot of creative projects."

Ironically, being tied to Greensboro has given Dossett an uncommon kind of freedom — a freedom to pursue unconventional projects and a freedom to grow roots in a community and become instrumental in the lives of people like McGinn.

"I also lived in her carriage house at her old house in Westerwood, when I had lost two jobs and was going through a very personal, emotional and financial crisis," McGinn said. "And if it wasn't for having that little safe place to crash back there...that's really where I started working on my dreams."

Dossett’s generosity particularly extends with Triad Stage, where she has been a mentor to many young up-and-coming musicians in the area, including Giddens, whom Dossett hired as a musician for "Beautiful Star" back in 2006.

"I mean the list goes on of young people in whom she was able to see real gut and real talent," Sickenberger said. "She helped launch them with her encouragement."

Dossett makes sure that women are properly represented in anything she does. That’s especially important in her genre.

"Whereas you might get a bluegrass festival saying 'well we already have one female performer, we can't have any more,'" Gerrard said, "There would always be multiple women in any event Laurelyn put together."

Just take a look at her interviews for the "A Place in the Band" series, where she's spoken with Giddens and Gerrard, but also other heavy-hitters in the industry such as Missy Raines and Laurie Lewis. Right now, with little else to do, it's been one of the few positives for Dossett this year.

"I haven't had a gig since March 7 and a lot of us have not,” Dossett said. “I lost my father in July. My mom's in a nursing home. It's been a really hard year. And so to have these conversations with these really strong women, tenacious, grounded women has been personally just really uplifting for me. My sense is that it's the kinds of things that they're saying will be uplifting to anyone listening, not just women who are in the music business, you know?"

Many of the people Dossett has spent her artistic life working with would likely apply the same adjectives to her: strong, tenacious and grounded. The truth is, by this point, she has every right to list her name alongside Gerrard or any other roots artist in North Carolina, her impact coming not in sales numbers or chart-topping hits, but in subtle influences and encouragements for musicians throughout the region.

By the time the interview is wrapping up, the sun has almost completely dipped below the horizon, and Hanging Rock is casting long shadows on her house. It’s time to go; she'd like to make sure everyone gets home before the winding roads of Stokes County get too dark.