The Petersens are a family band made up of four siblings (Katie, Ellen, Matt, and Julianne), their mom, and a friend from another local family band, Emmett Franz.
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Meet The Petersens
Mom Karen started off playing the mandolin but switched to bass when Julianne decided to take up the mandolin.
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Nearly all of her musically-gifted children have finished college now, except for their youngest, Julianne, who graduated last year as high school valedictorian and was planning to study English Literature at John Brown University this fall.
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The other kids all studied at College of the Ozarks.
Matt graduated most recently, in 2017, with a B.A. in Business which comes in useful in doing the bookings for the band.
Ellen, who plays banjo, moved to Oklahoma City to work as a laboratory technician (and even had a short run on American Idol!) after graduating in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. But she has now moved back to Branson to focus on music and earn an MBA at Missouri State University.
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She’s also in charge of the band’s marketing and even married to a member of Branson’s OTHER major family band, The Haygoods.
Katie, the eldest, daughter is the band’s fiddle player. She’s studying at Oxford and comes home to play with the band when she can – and when she’s not teaching music and English in Nicaragua.
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Family friend emmet Franz plays the dobro, a resonator guitar, and spent 20 years traveling with his own family band The Franz Family.
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Bringing joy to the world
The 4 kids Petersen siblings got together to record a Christmas song – one that had commenters hoping they’d record a whole Christmas special someday.
The siblings’ live YouTube version of “Joy To the World” has been viewed over a quarter of a million times since it was posted.
According to their blog;
‘The first half of our show still has all the bluegrass favorites, but the second half has all-new holiday material that we were thrilled to debut last Sunday. For the show, we are adding standards like ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Joy to the World’ as well as some great bluegrass Christmas songs like ‘Santa Train’ by the great Patty Loveless.”
A class assignment
This performance was more than the siblings goofing around on YouTube though.
Ellen was working on her MBA at the time and asked her siblings to work up the song as part of a project for her management class.
We’re not sure how it fit into a graduate school assignment, but we’re willing to bet she got a good grade!
While it starts out as a cacophony with a bit of goofing around, once Ellen starts to rock out on the banjo things get serious.
The girls seem to be in on some joke that the rest of us aren’t and can hardly keep a straight face at first.
But then Ellen stops strumming and begins to sing.
The song definitely has a bluegrass vibe that we’re not used to hearing with our Christmas music, but it’s beautiful in its own way.
And commenters agreed;
“This warms my heart and brings a tear of joy and thankfulness to my eye. Shine On Petersens… shine on!”
Be sure to scroll down below to see their impressive performance!
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