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Organizers of NC Folk Festival's Songs of Hope & Justice concert plan songwriting program

The North Carolina Folk Festival kicks off with the Songs of Hope and Justice Concert Wednesday at the Carolina Theatre.

The concert series began in 2015 and has been a regular part of the folk festival since then. 

Singer-songwriter Laurelyn Dossett is the organizer of the event, bringing in such names as Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens. This year’s lineup includes bluegrass legend Alice Gerrard, sacred steel musicians DaShawn and Wendy Hickman of Mount Airy, and Greensboro’s Molly McGinn. 

Dossett says folk songs are the kind that people rally around. The long history of folk music may span across years and themes, but she says their juxtapositions hold them together.

“Old, like, labor songs, or old coal mining songs, and you put them next to new songs that might be about immigration or about climate change, or whatever they may be about. It's kind of surprising how similar they all are,” she says.

Dossett says the concert series will start a new pilot program called N.C. Song School. Ninth and tenth graders will learn songwriting through a weekend workshop and summer weeklong camp. 

“When the students write songs next summer we'll have a showcase of that week's work," she says. "But we will also choose a couple of the students to do their songs at next year's Songs of Hope & Justice.”

Following the kickoff concert, the North Carolina Folk Festival will run Friday through Sunday in downtown Greensboro. 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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