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Old Town goes downtown

Daron Letts
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, September 17, 2008

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The Dawgwoods are hosting a harvest hootenanny at the Top Knight on Saturday and you and your kin are invited.

The danceable and fanciful Old Town band is bringing a couple of dozen original tunes peppered with some creative covers to the stage for an evening of dance and lively music.

They'll offer acoustic interpretations of songs by Neil Young, Old Crow Medicine Show, Carly Simon and Sinead O'Connor, among others.

"We're rehearsing all week so we're going to come up with some new innovative ideas for some of the songs," said lead singer Lily Mae Dawgwood.

"We're inviting people to come down dressed in their finest hootenanny clothes, whatever they think a hootenanny costume may be."

Lily Mae will be joined by Pappy Dawgwood on fiddle, Elwood Dawgwood on bass, Otis Dawgwood on guitar and Joe Snow Dawgwood on ukulele.

The band members are multi-instrumentalists so there will also be banjo, harmonica and a variety of other unique instruments thrown in.

"We're going to show our diversity as a band," Lily Mae said.

The band enjoyed a brief hiatus over the summer while a few members did some travelling but they got together to play a couple of Old Town gigs. Saturday is their first major show since playing a string of performances at Folk on the Rocks.

"I describe the band the way I describe Old Town," Lily Mae said. "It's a very eclectic mix of sound, colour and ages and it's diverse in its ideas and like Old Town it's very friendly and easy to listen to and fit in."

The Dawgwoods are working on an upcoming demo CD featuring a selection of original songs recorded live in their Old Town studio. Their first completed recording, the song Don't Know Why, airs regularly on Radio Taiga.

The band steps on stage at 9 p.m. on Saturday night.