If you’ve ever found yourself trying to sing with a banjo and been unsure how to get the sound you want, this workshop is for you! In this workshop, Laura Boosinger, one of North Carolina’s most talented singers and interpreters of the music of the Southern region, will share some ideas to help you sing along with a banjo, including how to make sure that you’re singing in the right key as well as techniques to make your vocal interpretation match the song you’re singing. Laura will demonstrate a few songs and talk about the stylistic and artistic choices she makes in performing them. You do not need to be a banjo player to participate in this workshop! If you have a voice, you can sing, and we’d love to have you join us. There will be time for questions and answers at the end.
When Laura Boosinger was 18 years old, she moved to Swannanoa, NC, to attend Warren Wilson College, and soon after that enrolled in a banjo class. That class proved to be the beginning of an acclaimed career as a traditional musician. She was particularly taken with the Smathers Band’s mountain swing style, a blend of traditional mountain, western swing, and early-20th-century popular music. In 1984, Laura joined the Luke Smathers Band of Canton and was a member of the band for the next 13 years, until Smathers’ death in 1997. Bandmate Charles Gidney remembers that Boosinger was unusually adept at the stylistically fluid repertoire of the group. “Laura is a very talented musician. We had a wide repertoire and we played everything from old-time to classic country, waltzes to breakdowns, boogie to gypsy, western swing to Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby to Gene Autry—very few clawhammer banjo players could handle this while singing it all too.”
As a solo performer, Boosinger is much in demand. She does many concerts regionally and abroad, and her recordings are popular and highly praised. In addition to concerts and festival performances, she gives school performances and workshops geared for a variety of age levels and offers a week-long dance residency. She can also teach and lead an old-time shaped-note singing school.