Levon Helm's death on Thursday hit Greensboro's Laurelyn Dossett especially hard. Dossett had become friendly with the iconic singer/drummer from The Band in recent years, after he covered her song "Anna Lee" on his Grammy-winning 2007 album "Dirt Farmer." Helm introduced Dossett onstage at one of his "Midnight Ramble" shows as "the lady that wrote that beautiful song that sounds 300 years old," and it does sound like an artifact from the mists of time. "Anna Lee" is a song about a dead woman who comes back to her children in their dreams, singing to them -- which seems fitting now.

"I didn't know when I wrote it that I would be remembering Levon in that same way," Dossett said on Thursday. "He gave my little song a big life and I am forever grateful. I didn't know the iconic Levon, just this sweet old man who sang the hell out of my song, welcomed me into his home numerous times and remembered to ask about my daughters and husband. He was curious and full of life. I took Alice Gerrard up there for a gig; they know a lot of people in common but had never met. It was a thrill to listen to them at the kitchen table, telling stories. And then they started singing some old song that they both knew. Amazing."

Dossett will be at the Shakori Hills Grassroots Folk Festival this weekend,  where she'll sing Helm's signature song "The Weight" with Tara Nevins. That song is very much in the air right now. Check out the scene Thursday night at Cat's Cradle, the encore played by Drive-By Truckers and Megafaun.

Ordinarily, a primary election happening after presidential nominations are set would be a low-key affair. But that's not the case in North Carolina this year, thanks to Amendment 1 -- which would write into the state constitution that the only valid legal domestic union is marriage between one man and one woman.

While numerous business and political leaders have weighed in against it, Amendment 1 still appears headed for passage with a solid double-digit lead in most opinion polls. And in a move reminescent of past campaigns against the late Sen. Jesse A. Helms, North Carolina's music community has taken up the cause of trying to rally voters against it.

One such event is Thursday night at Durham's Motorco Music Hall, a benefit for Protect NC Families.  Superchunk's Mac McCaughan, Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and Reigning Sound's Greg Cartwright will all play, with comedian Tara Defrancisco serving as host. Cover is $20; but if you want to shell out for the $100 VIP ticket, you get to request a song they'll play.

On April 27, Stu McLamb from The Love Language, John Howie and others will play at Carrboro Town Hall from noon to 4 p.m. This one is to raise awareness about early voting (which begins Thursday).

The biggest local anti-Amendment 1 show so far is the Concert to Defeat Amendment One May 6 at Haw River Ballroom, with Bob Mould, David Cross, Stu McLamb, comedian Tig Notaro, Superchunk in acoustic-duo format (!) and Amber Tamblyn. Tickets are $80 and include a silkscreened event poster.

There's also been at least one very fine new song inspired by this, "Vote Against Amendment One." Composed by Greensboro's Laurelyn Dossett (of "The Gathering" fame), it features Molly McGinn, Carolina Chocolate Drop Rhiannon Giddens Laffan and others.

Read more about the campaigns for and against the amendment here.

For the second straight year, an act with Triangle connections will be center-stage at next February's Grammy Awards. Where it was Arcade Fire this past year, next year it will be Bon Iver -- whose frontman Justin Vernon used to call Raleigh home.

Bon Iver scored nominations in the prestigious record and song of the year categories for "Holocene," a track from the group's eponymous 2011 album. That was part of a four-nomination haul including best alternative album and even best new artist.

The latter category is odd because "Bon Iver" was the group's third release -- and its first two both made the top half of the Billboard 200 album sales charts. One of the other best-new-artist nominees also has North Carolina connections, Fayetteville rapper J. Cole, nominated on the strength of his chart-topping album "Cole World: The Sideline Story."

Industry observer Sean Ross, executive editor of the Ross On Radio newsletter, cites Nicki Minaj as this year's worthiest best-new-artist nominee. But he predicts that Minaj won't win because she and J. Cole "will cancel each other out," which might allow Bon Iver to sneak in there the way Arcade Fire did for album of the year back in February.

"Then it's Bon Iver's people-who-propelled-Arcade-Fire vote versus The Band Perry's combination mainstream-audience vote and the never-insigificant 'I don't really follow new music but I hear they're good' vote," Ross said.

The nominations were announced Wednesday night at a Grammy concert at Staples Center in Los Angeles, where the awards will be presented Feb. 12. As expected, Adele's top-selling "21" album led the field with six nominations. Bruno Mars, Mumford & Sons, Rihanna and Lady Gaga all picked up multiple nominations in the major categories, too.

As for other nominations of North Carolina interest:

Eric Church, an Appalachian State alumnus from Granite Falls, was nominated for best country album, up against a field including Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum and Jason Aldean.

North Carolina School of the Arts alumnus Jim Lauderdale, a two-time winner in past years, earned a nomination for best bluegrass album -- and also appears on a Tom T. Hall tribute album nominated for best children's album. Among Lauderdale's competition in the bluegrass category will be Brevard's Steep Canyon Rangers, sharing a nomination with comedian/banjo player Steve Martin.

Asheville guitarist Warren Haynes, a veteran of Gov't Mule and Allman Brothers, was nominated for best blues album.

Durham-based Merge Records, which captured last year's best-album Grammy with Arcade Fire, picked up a best-recording-package nomination for the expanded deluxe version of the same album. Zooey Deschanel, who records with M. Ward as the Merge duo She & Him, was also nominated in best song written for visual media, for the "Winnie the Pooh" song "So Long."

Marsalis Music, the label of Durham jazzman Branford Marsalis, scored in the category of best large jazz ensemble album for "Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook."

Levon Helm's live album "Ramble at the Ryman," nominated for best Americana album, includes "Anna Lee," written by Greensboro's Laurelyn Dossett. That song has already been on one Grammy-winning album, Helm's "Dirt Farmer," which won best tradtional folk album in 2008.

ADDENDUM: Another nominee with local connections is recording engineer Miles Walker, who grew up in Raleigh and mostly works out of Atlanta. Walker engineered records that scored a total of eight nominations, including hits by Rhianna, Katy Perry and Wiz Khalifa, sharing the nomination on two of them -- Rhianna's album-of-the-year nod for "Loud," and Perry's record-of-the-year nomination for "Firework."

SECOND ADDENDUM: I received a pretty detailed response about who does and does not qualify as a "new" artist in Grammyland from another industry pundit, former USA Today music editor Ken Barnes. I'm fascinated in wonky stuff like this, so I'm passing along the whole thing:

As a 25-year Grammy voter, I've watched the definition of a new artist "evolve" from super-strict (one prior guest appearance on someone else's album disqualified Whitney Houston from new-artist consideration in the '80s) to the current, almost-anything-goes guidelines.

It's basically a wording problem at this point; if the category were called "best emerging artist" or "breakthrough artist" or something like that, it wouldn't be such a communications problem. Basically what the Grammys try to do is establish whether, with a particular album, an artist has achieved a breakthrough to the general public. If Bon Iver was considered a critical/indie/minority-taste hit prior to this record, then the Grammys would declare them eligible. If the Academy felt a breakthrough had occurred with a previous record, based on sales, airplay, critical acclaim, buzz, mass acceptance, etc., then no.

With only rather generally worded guidelines, it's always dicey, and standards tend to waffle. So there's always one or two "new artists" that stick in journalists' craws, for good reason.

Most of the time when Rhiannon Giddens is singing with her old-time stringband Carolina Chocolate Drops, you'd never know that she has a classical background. But she started out as an opera singer at Oberlin College, and she flashed some of those chops onstage Friday night at the North Carolina Symphony’s Holiday Pops show at Meymandi Concert Hall. She did a lovely star turn on "O Holy Night," which was the first high point of the evening.

Still, that was just a warm-up for the main event, the symphonic preview of "The Gathering" -- Laurelyn Dossett's holiday song cycle about the ups, downs, joys, tears and fears of holiday-season family get-togethers. It was truly lovely, with composer Aaron Grad's Americana-by-way-of-Aaron-Copland arrangements meshing perfectly with the stringband quartet of Dossett, Giddens, banjo player Joe Newberry and mandolin man Mike Compton.

On the outro to the high-spirited "Redbird," Giddens kicked off her high heels to dance and Newberry (a self-described "recovering clogger") was right there with her to do an impressive little soft-shoe number. All I've got to say is it was a far better way to kick off the holidays than a midnight Black Friday sale. "The Gathering" also plays two shows on Saturday, and it's well worth checking out. Hope they will perform it beyond this weekend, too.

Laurelyn Dossett has been a consistent presence in North Carolina old-time/folk circles over the last decade, in part because she's versatile enough to do a lot of things well. Among other things, that led to her collaboration with the NC Symphony on "The Gathering," a lovely piece of music about a prodigal daughter's holiday-season return that has its full-orchestra premiere on Friday.

"I keep finding myself in collaborations I didn't expect, whether in theater, this with the symphony -- or my next one, with Daniel Bernard Roumain. He's a classical violinist who plays like this hip-hop violin. As an instrumentalist, he's into telling stories people can connect to and he writes beautiful things, but he's always having to explain what they're about. So that's his desire to work with a lyricist."

That should be fascinating to hear. Meantime, "The Gathering" is right pretty and there's a story about it in Sunday's paper.