Album Review – Sweet Megg – “Bluer Than Blue”

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#511 & #570.8 (Western Swing, Jazz-Inspired Americana) on the Country DDS.

It feels imperative to discuss this interesting, lush, and instrumentally-powerful new album from the jazz-originating and now Nashville-based singer Sweet Megg. She takes her training and knowledge of 1920’s hot jazz, early blues, and gypsy swing, and finds the common thru-line with Western swing and classic country to favorable and sometimes irresistible results on her new album Bluer Than Blue.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen the sharp rise of older and older sounds creeping into newer country and roots music. Sierra Ferrell, Melissa Carper, and Charley Crockett have found musical pay dirt by incorporating archaic modes of American music into original compositions. This isn’t just about overlaying brass lines or using anachronistic language. It’s re-awakening sounds and modes we’ve all heard before that have gone under-exploited in the modern era, which makes them especially potent when implemented.

What we’d yet to hear until Sweet Megg and Bluer Than Blue is someone who takes this idea and goes all the way to its ultimate conclusion. Bob Wills and Western Swing were just as much jazz as they were country, and the same goes for Sweet Meg and Bluer Than Blue. It’s not interpolating these sounds with more contemporary sensibilities. It’s boldly and steadfastly traveling back to the ’20s-’40s period, and reviving the era in sound.

It’s hard to express just what an undertaking it must have been for Sweet Megg to see her vision through for this project. There’s no real way to cut corners or condense what needs to happen here for this sound to be accomplished. You have to go all-in, with full horn sections, and a steel and fiddle player who knows their stuff so the audience can suspend disbelief and feel like they’re listening to an old prohibition-era 78 rpm.


To accomplish this, Sweet Megg called upon the services of folks like console steel player Chris Scruggs, fiddler Billy Contreras, a horn section of Mike Davis, Ricky Alexander, and Sam Chess, Dalton Ridenhour on ragtime piano, and right hand man Justin Poindexter on guitar. Just like Megg herself, they all had to be steeped in the vernacular of early jazz, blues, and country like it was second nature.

If nothing else, Bluer Than Blue really is an instrumental clinic from top to bottom, and despite Chris Scruggs’ prolific status, this just might be the best showcase for his steel playing ever placed under one title. The horn parts are so *chef kiss* perfect for evoking the desired era, at times it inspires goosebumps. The overall production approach is just faded enough to facilitate the immersive time warp this album sends you down, but not to the point where you feel like you’re listening through a filmy residue.

Songs from Kris Kristofferson, Bob Wills, Webb Pierce, and Fred Rose are mixed seamlessly in with Duke Ellington and Moon Mullican. The slight disappointment with Sweet Megg and Bluer Than Blue is the lack of novel material. There is only one original song in “Little Bit,” which might be one of the weaker tracks. The album makes for a great prototype or proof of concept. But with so many albums out there also seizing on throwback sounds with new compositions, it puts Bluer Than Blue at a slight disadvantage.

Make no mistake though, there is definitely an inventiveness to what Sweet Megg has done here sonically, even if the sounds she’s fused together are super old. And of course the cherry on top is her voice and delivery refined in New York and France as an astute jazz understudy before migrating to the American South to retrace the family tree of two important musical genres back to their founding roots right next to each other.

8/10

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