On his way out of office, in 2024, one of Governor Roy Cooper’s initiatives was to establish a new department inside N.C.’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (DNCR): the North Carolina Music Office. 

One of the office’s first projects, created through DNCR program Come Hear NC, is Shaped by Sound, a new PBS series on North Carolina’s music. Over thirteen episodes, Shaped by Sound will look at a wide range of artists from Wilmington to Asheville, in genres ranging from R&B to country-rock legacy. Featured artists include legacy acts like Superchunk, Reuben Vincent, and Alice Gerrard and newer acts like Sluice, Blue Cactus, and Sonny Miles. Other featured Triangle acts include Fancy Gap, Shirlette Ammons, and Mipso. 

“Our state is known for its rich musical legacy—John Coltrane, Doc Watson, Nina Simone, Etta Baker, and James Taylor, are just a tiny sliver of the greats who have called NC home,” says Stephanie Stewart, one-half of local duo Blue Cactus, “but it’s also a thriving, living legacy, and I’m thrilled to have a program like this that is devoted to shining a spotlight on it.” 

Only four other states have state-sponsored music offices like this. Its formation is an effort to celebrate the state’s rich musical history and bolster its creative economy. 

“The governor signed his executive order on June 21, which is International Make Music Day,” explains Kara Leinfelder, the director of business development at the NC Music Office, “We had a lot of communities across the state celebrating Make Music Day, which was led by the North Carolina Arts Council—it was a program to recognize and spotlight how important music is to North Carolina, its contemporary history and its past, and all the rich traditions that we have here.” 

While North Carolina boasts strong talent, the sector has struggled to regain its footing post-pandemic, with conditions increasingly difficult for artists and venues. Last month, J. Cole announced that 2025 would be the last year that he held Dreamville, a megawatt hip-hop festival that generated around $122 million for Wake County in 2024. 

The announcement marked the second recent major festival exit from the Tar Heel state’s capital: After many years in Raleigh, the IBMA Bluegrass Festival departed for Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2024. (Raleigh Wide Open, a homegrown music festival from Raleigh nonprofit PineCone, will fill the bluegrass gap this next year.) 

Shaped by Sound premieres on February 6 with the spotlight trained on Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, who lives in Durham. It will air on PBS North Carolina on Thursdays at 6:30 p.m., and will also be available across multiple platforms—pbsnc.org, the PBS app, and YouTube. A playlist of the show’s music can be heard here.

Stewart says she hopes the show will encourage people to turn out for live performances. 

“As an independent artist, being a part of something like this can have a significant impact in helping others in our home state, and potentially beyond, connect with our music,” she says. “I hope that folks who watch the program will discover some of their new favorite local artists and go see them live when they come touring through their towns.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email sedwards@indyweek.com.

Related

The ongoing saga over the race for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat is in the hands of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, for now.

On Tuesday morning, the state board of elections appealed to the 4th Circuit, just a few hours after a federal district court judge granted Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin’s motion to remand his election protest lawsuit to the state Supreme Court.

Griffin, a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals, trails Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs by 734 votes, a gap confirmed by two recounts. But Griffin has been trying to have more than 60,000 ballots invalidated — and deducted from the vote count — over alleged irregularities, including purportedly incomplete voter registrations.

Last month, the five-member Democratic-majority state elections board held hearings and dismissed Griffin’s protests due to a lack of evidence of actual voter ineligibility as well as inadequate notice to affected voters.

Then Griffin circumvented the typical state court appeals process and filed a writ of prohibition with the heavily conservative state Supreme Court asking the justices to block the elections board from certifying his electoral loss.

Attorneys for the elections board had the matter removed to federal district court because, they have argued, it raised questions of federal law and threatened to undermine U.S. Constitutional protections against disenfranchisement.

In most of the cases, Griffin has alleged the disputed ballots were cast by voters who did not properly register under North Carolina law. The issue has to do with voters who registered — many years and election cycles ago — using a form that predated the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, of 2002. The pre-HAVA registration form did not clearly mandate registrants provide the last four digits of their Social Security number or their driver’s license number.

Griffin’s protests notwithstanding, neither state law nor HAVA makes having a Social Security number or a driver’s license number a prerequisite for voting.

In cases where elections officials cannot confirm the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number or that person’s driver’s license number — often due to a clerical error — that voter must present a so-called HAVA document, such as a utility bill, when they first show up to vote.

And if a person registering to vote does not have a Social Security number or a driver’s license number, HAVA provides that a state elections administration office must assign the voter a special identification number for the purposes or registering.

However, Griffin’s attorneys countered that while state election law incorporates HAVA the GOP judicial candidate’s case involves a state election and concerns interpretations of state, not federal, law.

Griffin has also protested the counting of hundreds of ballots submitted by some absentee military and overseas voters who did not provide photo identification, even though state administrative code, in accordance with federal law, explicitly excuses such overseas voters from that requirement.

Additionally, Griffin has alleged some ballots should be discarded because they were cast by ineligible voters who live overseas. These protests claim children of overseas voters — for example, missionaries and military personnel — who had never resided in North Carolina, should not have been allowed to vote, though such voters are eligible under state law, again, in line with federal laws protecting the voting rights of overseas citizens.

On Monday, Judge Richard E. Myers II, appointed to the federal bench by Donald Trump, ruled in Griffin’s favor and remanded the case to the state Supreme Court “with due regard for state sovereignty and the independence of states to decide matters of substantial public concern.”

Now that the elections board – along with other advocacy groups intervening in the matter – has appealed that remand order, it will be up to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals whether this matter is resolved at the state or federal level.

As for the electoral contest between Justice Riggs and Judge Griffin, the state elections board is poised to certify the results Friday barring court intervention.