NEDERLAND -- Music has been an important part of Laurie Dameron’s life since childhood. Her mom started teaching her how to sing as a toddler, even teaching her and her sister three-part harmonies to sing on car trips.
She started piano lessons around the age of four, but as a child, she didn’t like being told what to do. Her mother encouraged her to try various endeavors, including ballet, tap dancing, acting, and swimming. However, none of them truly stuck with her.
When Dameron was around seven years old, her mother started taking guitar lessons. As a form of rebellion, Dameron would sneak into her mother’s room and teach herself how to play the guitar. From there, she completely fell in love with performing.
She played her first gig at a brewery in Pearl Street Mall with two friends from junior high and high school, brothers Dave and Drew Emmitt, with the latter later becoming one of the “Big Three” members of Leftover Salmon.
Dameron went to college at Adams State University in Alamosa, and for her last two years there, she ran the open mic at the school. She posted flyers, ran marketing, and made sure to advertise the event during her time as a DJ for the local radio station KASF-FM.
During her time at Adams State, she toured with ASC Big Band Jazz Ensemble. As part of that group, she performed twice in the Greeley Jazz Festival, where her playing impressed virtuoso jazz guitar player Johnny Smith. She briefly received free guitar lessons from Smith at his music store in Colorado Springs, but ultimately moved to Summit County in 1983.
In the late 1980s, she started playing with the Denver jazz big band Moodswing, where she met bassist Lorrie Baum. When Moodswing ultimately stopped performing, Dameron (electric guitar) and Baum (bass and trombone) started playing in a new group, Sister Swing, which also featured Mary Ann Moore (who took her stage name from the poet Marianne Moore) as the lead vocalist. Sister Swing played as the in-house band for The Three Sisters in Denver for a summer.
In the early 1990s, Dameron decided to pursue a full-time solo career for the first time, playing her first solo gig at Muddy’s Cafe. There, she met one of her longtime collaborators, bassist Jeff Fournier, for the first time. Since then, Dameron has released three solo albums and three solo singles, continued performing as a solo artist, started a duo with Baum called Laurie and Lorrie, and performed in the band Laurie D and the Blues Babes.
Among other achievements, Dameron has received two awards from Billboard Magazine, passed the first round of America’s Got Talent auditions in 2013, won the songwriting contest hosted by the Colorado Music Business Association for three years in a row (2013-2015), and received Boulder Magazine’s REAL Award in 2011.
Dameron has occasionally served as a judge for music events in Colorado. In 2017, after competing in the event the previous year, she was invited as a judge for the Zing for Zonta: Boulder’s Got Talent event at eTown. In 2019 and 2020, Paul Bailey invited her as a judge for the 2019 and 2020 Kiwanis Club Boulder Stars of Tomorrow Youth events (in fact, for the 2020 event, the writer of this article won Best Contemporary Performance for his original song “Call it A Day”).
Dameron has also been a member of Business and Professional Women of Colorado (BPW) for almost two decades, and she won the Member of the Year Award in 2014. In 2015, she became the organization’s first chair of the environment, a position she retired from in 2023. In 2017, she won BPW’s Trailblazer Woman of the Year Award, and in 2021, she created a multi-media presentation program through BPW called “Spaceship Earth.”
Ultimately, Dameron credits much of where she is now to her sobriety, which she has kept since 1987. Music has always been something that she has connected with and that has come to her easily. Over her career, she’s reflected that because of how naturally learning music comes to her, she has often struggled with motivation to practice and finish projects.
However, she keeps performing as much as she possibly can because playing music brings her peace. She loves writing and performing, even in performances where her music fades into the background, because she recognizes how much music affects people. In general, she hopes that the people who listen to her songs feel the same peace and joy listening to them as she feels performing them.
You can see Laurie Dameron performing at Busey Brews, located at 70 East First Street in Nederland, on Sunday, February 16, 2025, starting at 2 p.m. To learn more about Laurie Dameron as a musician and person, head to her website at lauriedameron.com.
