Swamp Dogg – Macon Film Festival After-Party

Macon Film Festival, happening August 15-18, is featuring the documentary, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, and the star of the documentary will take the stage at Grant’s Lounge. Swamp Dogg’s remarkable new album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St., is a “riotous blend of past and present, mixing the sacred and the profane in typical Swamp Dogg fashion as it blurs the lines between folk, roots, country, blues, and soul.” With an all-star band including Sierra Hull, Jerry Douglas and Chris Scruggs, the album’s tracklist is an eclectic one—brand new originals and vintage Swamp Dogg classics sit side by side with reimaginings of ’70s R&B hits and timeless ’50s pop tunes—but the performances are thoroughly cohesive, filtering everything through a progressive Appalachian lens that nods to tradition without ever being bound by it. Special guests like Margo Price, Vernon Reid, Jenny Lewis, Justin Vernon, and The Cactus Blossoms all add to the excitement, but it’s ultimately the 81-year-old Swamp Dogg’s delivery—sly and playful and full of genuine joy and ache—that steals the show. The result is a record that’s as reverent as it is raunchy, a collection that challenges conventional notions of genre and race while at the same time celebrating the music that helped make Swamp Dogg the beloved iconoclast he’s known as today.