Under 21 with Guardian

Sara Morgan
Sara Morgan has been dazzling country music listeners “in the know” for nearly a decade, according to “Saving Country Music”.  From the small town of McGehee, Arkansas all the way to WSM 650 AM in Nashville, TN, she has “taken the stairs” on her journey as she meticulously climbed each step while enchanting audiences across America along the way.

Sara emerged in 2018 with her first full length release “Average Jane” at #3 on the Billboard Heatseeker chart and a review of the lead single “The Boots” in Music Row magazine.  A triple threat in that she can play, sing, and write, Rolling Stone's senior editor, Joseph Hudak, dubbed her “one to watch” in 2019 with the release of her first Nashville single, “Church in a Bar” after seeing her perform the song at the Americana Music Fest that year.

“Church in a Bar” was produced by critically acclaimed mastering engineer, Eric Conn and recorded at the legendary Allentown Recording Studio (Garth Brooks' studio formerly known as Jack's Tracks) with legendary musicians Eddie Bayers, Steve Gibson, Dan Dugmore and the late, great Michael Rhodes.  Her very first Nashville recording session was star studded and each of her tracks were recorded live right alongside each of those musicians.  

The release of the live track, “American Hill”, in 2022, a tribute to her late sailor brother, resulted in her being requested specifically for veterans benefits, as she is as passionate about supporting American veterans as she is about country music.  

Sara has opened for everyone from Ray Wylie Hubbard and John Michael Montgomery to the Eli Young Band, played theaters and arenas, personally frequented hundreds of radio stations, and is set to cement her place in country music this fall with the upcoming single “She Ain't the Homewrecker (That's You)”.

https://saramorganmusic.com/


Kelly Hunt
On the walls of any local used music shop there hangs a gallery of mysteries. Picked up and handed down across the decades, each instrument contains the imprints and stories of those who have played it before, most of which remain untold. For Kansas City-based songwriter Kelly Hunt, the most intriguing of these stories is the origin of her anonymous calfskin tenor banjo. “I really wasn’t looking for it,” she says, “but I opened up the case and found a note saying, ‘This banjo was played by a man named Ira Tamm in his dog and pony show from 1920 to 1935.’ It was unlike any banjo I’d ever heard…so warm and mellow, with an almost harp-like quality to it, very soulful”—apt words for the Memphis native’s debut album, Even The Sparrow, which was released in May 2019 and nominated for the International Folk Music Awards “2019 Album of the Year.”

The daughter of an opera singer and a saxophonist, Hunt was raised in Memphis, TN amidst a motley mélange of musical influences ranging from Rachmaninov to Joni Mitchell to Mississippi John Hurt. She grew up singing in choirs, poring over poetry books, and writing her own music as a matter of course, first on piano then 5-string banjo. After being introduced to the banjo in college while studying French and visual arts, Hunt began to develop her own improvised style of playing, combining old-time picking styles with the percussive origins of the instrument. After college, Hunt embarked on a rambling path through career pursuits in farming, French breadmaking, and visual arts, ultimately landing in Kansas City, where she would go on to write and record Even the Sparrow.

This debut work displays Hunt’s penchant for storytelling and intriguing arrangement, punctuated by articulate melodies and lyrical deft. While reminiscent of modern traditionalists such as Gillian Welch, Even The Sparrow reveals an ineffable quality that hovers beyond the constraints of genre, à la Anais Mitchell and Patty Griffin. Over the span of a dozen songs, Hunt’s penchant for storytelling and intriguing arrangement cast a spell which No Depression describes as “the musical equivalent of a book you can’t put down, one you’ll want to revisit again and again to catch every nuance and turn of phrase.”

In “Men of Blue & Grey,” what begins as a Reconstruction-era ballad about the repurposing of Civil War glass plate negatives in a greenhouse roof soon becomes a meditation on the hope that growth and life may one day be able to emerge from the ruins of suffering and haunting of violence. “Across The Great Divide” turns an otherwise traditional accounting of spurned love into a philosophical epic of the ethics offorgiveness and freedom, evoking the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard and Walt Whitman.

As for the original owner of Kelly Hunt’s mysterious tenor banjo, not much is known. “I’ve never been able to find anything about Ira Tamm,” she says, “I think he just had a humble little traveling show.” What’s clear is that the itinerant performer laid down his banjo at the height of the Great Depression, almost eighty years before it would be picked up by Hunt. “That banjo has stories. I wish I knew them all,” says Hunt, though the banjo’s most intriguing story may just be beginning with Even The Sparrow. “The marks of Ira’s hands are still in the calfskin head, so I can see where he played and left his mark,” she says. “Now my own marks are there too, in different places, like a kind of portrait.”

Production is currently underway on Kelly’s sophomore album “Ozark Symphony,” produced by Dirk Powell at his Cypress House Studio in St. Martinville, LA.

https://www.kellyhuntmusic.com/