Sara Morgan’s new country has old-fashioned roots
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When Sara Morgan talks about her idol, Loretta Lynn, excitement almost overcomes her. Morgan met the 82-year-old queen of country music by chance in September, on her first trip to Nashville, and the experience still leaves her a little speechless.
“I had never been to the Ryman [Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry], so I was already overwhelmed, you know, as a country musician,” she says. “And I walk in, and Loretta Lynn is just sitting there with Vince Gill, and he had his arm around her, and I just panicked. I walked up to her” — Morgan pauses to recoil at the memory — “and I said, ‘You’re why I write songs!’ and I started crying and I walked off.”
On Saturday, Morgan aims to better that first impression. Ahead of Lynn’s headlining show at the Uptown Theater, Morgan performs a warm-up set in the adjacent Industry Bar, and she hopes the association will give her the opportunity to exchange a few more words (and fewer tears) with the legend.
I ask Morgan what makes Lynn so important to her, and her response is quick and enthusiastic.
“She’s so good with a hook!” she says. “The first time I heard the song ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man,’ I was like, ‘That’s such a good turn of phrase!’ She’s cheeky, she’s feisty, and I really like that. All her hooks are so good. ‘You’ve Just Stepped In (From Steppin’ Out on Me)’ — I love that!”
It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Morgan with a proper opening slot for Lynn on the Uptown’s stage. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter’s debut EP, 2013’s Let Me Get There, is a smart and charming package of country tunes that confidently mixes modern lyrics with the generous hum of steel guitar and the unabashed twang of Lynn and Dolly Parton. I’m reminded with every ugly dress I buy that I still have a life of my own, Morgan chirps on “The Bridesmaid Song.”
And there’s another reason that Lynn captivates Morgan. She, too, has humble beginnings akin to those of the famed coal miner’s daughter.
“I don’t come from anything,” Morgan says. “I’m literally a farm girl from the middle of nowhere. My parents are divorced, I’m one of eight kids, and my dad has worked in a paper factory all his life.”
Morgan’s “middle of nowhere” is the small town of McGehee in southeast Arkansas, where she was born and where she lived until moving to Kansas City when she was 10. After graduating from Olathe South High School, in 2007, Morgan returned to Arkansas for college. She has been back and forth between Fayetteville and Kansas City for the past four years, she says, but over the last 18 months, she has learned to call Kansas City her permanent home.
She still has that distinctive Arkansan drawl, though — softer on her recordings — and her words glide easily from one sentence to the next. As we talk at RecordBar, she keeps her cap and her coat on as she sips her beer. The weeknight band does a sound check behind her, and a few comforting Americana chords find us. It’s good stuff but not the radio-hit country that Morgan writes. You’d be hard-pressed to find her particular brand around, actually, and I tell her that Kansas City doesn’t much like the Nashville of her heroes.
“You know what, that’s what I thought,” she says. “But it has been so welcoming here. I’ve played just under a hundred shows this year, and it’s been a little of travel but a lot in Kansas City, lot of opening gigs. People have been so welcoming, and I think it’s a songwriting thing, not necessarily because of the genre.”
She adds, “Songwriters are just so willing to like other songwriters. I think there are actually so many more opportunities here than a place like that [Nashville], where everyone is scrambling for the same thing. They’re all writing for a certain purpose. They all want that cut. It’s easy to lose perspective in a place like that, and I don’t want that to happen. This is home.”
