Sweet Megg‘My Window Faces the South’Turtle Bay RecordsThe history of American vernacular music is marked by repeated, almost cyclical moments of a Pangea-like coming together of different forms and ideas. In the mid-1940s, when the Black swing bands made a more concerted effort to play the basic blues, the result was R&B; a decade later, when R&B artists incorporated wholesale elements of gospel, that became soul music. Country music and jazz have always existed as parallel streams, and yet there have been remarkable instances when the two came together, as in the mid-1930s, when Milton Brown, Bob Wills, and others fused the two into what became known as Western Swing, and in the mid-1950s, when young country musicians began to play boogie-woogie and created rockabilly.Sweet Megg is an artist who flourishes in those spaces. In fact, this may be something of a Pangea moment, in that there have been three recent albums by outstanding female singers that explore the connections between country music and jazz: Janie Barnett is a country singer who recorded a fascinating album of songs by Cole Porter, as reviewed here, and Hilary Gardner is a jazz singer who uncovered a unique subgenre of vintage Western link songs that she made into an excellent album.Conversely, Sweet Megg — whose full name is Meaghan Farrell — is not a country singer singing jazz nor a jazz singer doing country. Yet more than almost any singer since the legendary Kay Starr, she can sing both at the same time, doing equal justice to each, and showing what they have in common.Sweet Megg’s third and latest album is “My Window Faces the South.” It was recorded at Nashville, using a combination of mostly C&W-oriented string and rhythm players plus three young, swing-centric horn players from New York. Trumpeter Mike Davis, trombonist Sam Chess, and saxophonist Ricky Alexander take their places with fiddler Billy Contreras, steel guitarist Chris Scruggs, and bassist Dennis Crouch, as well two more veterans of the Manhattan Hot Jazz scene: pianist Dalton Ridenhour and drummer Chris Gelb.Two songs in particular are almost literally smoking guns in terms of the conjoined tradition of jazz and country music. The album starts with “Faded Love,” a 1950 composition by the King of Western Swing, Bob Wills, that was one of the last hits for Wills himself and then, 13 years later, virtually the final recording of Patsy Cline. As a Western swing ballad that was also embraced by mainstream country stars, it’s a perfect song for Sweet Megg, who sings it with a hint of a beat, also a hint of a yodel, and more than a hint of bittersweet regret. The album’s title is a 1937 song by three Tin Pan Alley veterans, among them Mitchell Parish, the lyricist most famous for “Stardust,” which is also heard here. In jazz circles, it’s most closely associated with Fats Waller, but it was also famously recorded by Wills and his Texas Playboys, and thus considered a country music classic. The song is a typical Brill Building concoction that depicts the deep South as the Elysian Fields of our collective dreams: “My window faces the south, I’m almost halfway to Heaven.” As with most of these songs, the writers had probably never been south of New Jersey. Even so, Sweet Megg imbues it with a deeply expressed devotion for a mythical home amidst the fields of cotton. The instrumental break features a chase chorus between Mr. Scruggs’s guitar and the three horns.Sweet Megg and her Western Swing ensemble tackle other songbook standards, like Fats Waller’s “I’ve Got A Feeling I’m Falling,” the 1921 “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” and “Stardust,” as well as country classics like the “Tennessee Waltz” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the latter being perhaps Ray Charles’s best-known country hit. Sweet Megg and her band really go to town on two iconic blues numbers, “Trouble in Mind” and “Hesitation Blues.” She shows that both jazz and country music are deeply rooted in the quintessential 12-bar blues; the first is slow and mournful, a wistful prayer that “the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday,” the second is fast and aggressive.Throughout, Sweet Megg and her ensemble perform these songs with high style and an infectious energy. She is consistently the musical equivalent of one of those new discoveries of quantum physics, an entity who can somehow simultaneously exist in two spaces at the same time.
