Lost Love, Murder, and Hillbillies… Songs of the Ozarks hosted by Ozarks Heritage Research Center Featuring Dawn Larsen

This event is sponsored by the Ozarks Heritage Research Center and WPCA. Refreshments provided.

Performer/storyteller/singer-songwriter and fifth generation Ozarker, Dawn grew up amid lots of mountain music, arts, storytelling, beautiful hills and rivers. She taught herself to play guitar at 13. At a family gathering at about that age, after she had finished singing traditional ballads and was taking a break, her mother pulled her aside and asked, “Don’t you know anything besides death and dying music?” She’s proud to play Roots music, which is full of “death and dyin,” an integral part of the human condition. She regularly plays festivals, house concerts, listening rooms, gives workshops in performing and writing, and other events. She completed a songwriting artist-in-residency in Northern Ireland in 2024 and has also released two CDs of original music. She founded and operated the last traveling Toby tent show in the country for ten years. In 2025 she retired as Professor of Theatre at Francis Marion University in South Carolina where she specialized in American popular entertainment, especially rural comedy.

About the presentation — The Halloween season is the perfect time to sit back and have a listen to old (and new) songs of the Ozarks and its dark and spooky past. There might be a couple of stories thrown in as well. Come join the fun… if you dare…