Welcome to StepDanceGirl.com!  My name is Lorien and I live in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina with my parents and one sister.

When I was 11, I saw a group called Leahy step dancing and I fell in love. I showed my friends and they loved it, too!  I have learned to dance by watching them. Now I’m 12, and I created this site so that all my friends can learn to step dance with me.  Step dancing is so fun and happy – it’s great exercise, too.

Every Tuesday in the summer, our family hosts “Fiddle Camp” where my father and sister teach fiddle and I teach step dancing.  On weekends, I sing and play with The Cockman Family (my father and his siblings) in which Daddy is the fiddle player and bass singer. He has a website called BluegrassDaddy.com where he teaches all kinds of fiddling.  Our family travels a lot, sharing Jesus Christ with our music.  Each Memorial Day weekend, we go to a special festival in Union Grove, NC called Fiddler’s Grove.  This is my favorite event of the year with great competitions, amazing music and lots of fun!  It is so inspiring and we always come home wanting to play music all day… oh, that’s all we want to do anyway…

My sister and I have a band together that we call The Butterpats. We play an odd mixture of gospel, bluegrass, Canadian and western music.  By “western,” I mean yodeling.  Yep, that’s right.  We yodel!  When my sister and I were about four and five, we went to Tweetsie Railroad and while we were there, we heard a group called Riders in the Sky yodeling!  We got their CD and my sister went around yodeling for months.  In 2011, we went out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to compete in the Western Music Association‘s yodeling competition. We won two prizes!  It was a lot of fun and we met so many wonderful people who all dressed in western clothes! My sister and I also have a band with our friends call The Rambling Rosehip Players. I play the piano, mandolin, bass, dobro and fiddle with this group (we all switch instruments – often 🙂 ) and we all step dance.

I have found that it is hard to find lessons in Canadian step dancing.  I hope that this site will be a help to all those who would love to learn but can’t find the resources.  God bless you!

Love,

Lorien