At just 24 and 18 years old, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the Vogts Sisters are rookies to the music industry, or pop country divas just looking to become stars. However, the Kansas natives have not only been winning numerous contests and playing around their home state for years, they also grew up on the old-time cowboy ballads and a mix of bluegrass, folk and Americana, providing their music a maturity rarely found in women of their age. They cite the likes of Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch as influences, and their debut album ‘Old Time Noise’ (released in 2012) saw them tackling old-time ballads as well as three original songs that Maggie Vogt had penned in that vein. When their sophomore album ‘My Own Dixie’ became available in March 2015, therefore, it was to take things one step further with a record of all-original songs that saw them finding themselves as musicians and creators.
Three of the songs on the record are already award-winning. The sweet, lilting ‘Ballad of A Love Miscast’ won first place in the Folk Division of the 2014 Indie International Songwriting Contest, while the Alison Krauss-esque, hauntingly melancholic tale of woe ‘Guitar Man’ was a 2014 finalist in the Great American Song Contest. The heartfelt plea of ‘The Loving Kind’ has also been well-awarded, picking up fourth place in the 2015 Indie International Songwriting Contest and third place in the 2015 Woody Guthrie Folk Festival Songwriting Competition. Each were written by Maggie, who remains the lead songwriter of the duo, but the magic wouldn’t be there were it not for younger sister Abigail’s contributions. Those sisterly harmonies are sublime, pure and earthy, while the musicianship is multi-faceted and extremely capable, allowing them to stand far apart from their contemporaries despite their relative youth. Sporting great praise from the likes of No Depression and getting the opportunity to open for Jimmy Fortune and T Graham Brown, it’s clear these girls are going places, likely much further now that Abigail has graduated high school.
From the opening lines of ‘Lost Highway’, “I was just a young thing when he took me by the hand, he told me I was pretty so I joined his outlaw band… we ran from town to town, it was fun at first but now it drags me down,” they take a wearied look at their own juvenility, struck by the harsh realities of life and the clarity of situations when those more mature are unable to see the truth. On ‘New Heeled Boots’ they exude a sassy but understated confidence, while on ‘Better Off Alone’ they gaze sadly at the pain love brings, somewhere between the depths of the hurt and on the outside looking in. They’re not afraid to tackle subjects that are more close to home either, as while ‘Wrong’ could easily be about a conventional relationship, we get the sense that the girls are singing it in part about their relationship with each other, and their musical ambition as a pair. “We’ll show the world they’ve got it wrong,” they sing defiantly, against a world who thinks they won’t make it because they live outside the lines.
Still, that living outside the lines is all to their credit. The title track reminds us that they set their own rules and do their own thing, imagining quite literally their own Dixie, while ‘Southern Summer’ views the south in the summer as a haven of freedom after hard times rather than the typical seasonal party fare. Across ten effortlessly beautiful, soft bluegrass ballads, Maggie and Abigail Vogts lay out a plan for their music and narrative, with a firmer sense of who they are than most veterans. In fact, if you were not already aware of their youth, it would not be apparent, instead expecting women twice their age to be behind those mountain sopranos.
If the Vogts Sisters felt they were successful up until now, things are about to get a whole lot bigger. Stay tuned.
