Sweeney's ACL gig will be a dream come true

Austin-based country singer Sunny Sweeney peppers her conversation with such nowspeak as "dude," "awesome" and "MySpace," but when she opens her mouth to sing, the sassy lass sounds like her hometown of Longview in the 1960s, when Loretta Lynn ruled the airwaves. It's no wonder that Sweeney, who's been performing for only four years, calls her two shows opening for Lynn a career highlight.

"It's been like I'm living out a dream," she said. "I was hanging out in Nashville with (Mercury recording artist) Randy Rogers one day and we thought back to our days in college (at Texas State University in San Marcos) and we were going, 'How did this all happen?' When I was in college, I had aspirations to sing, but it's worked out a lot better than I could've hoped for."

After college, Sweeney moved to New York to pursue acting, not singing. She fell in with an improv troupe that eventually landed her back in Texas, where her Dolly Parton impression always went over like gangbusters. At the urging of a hony-tonk-loving stepfather, who taught her some chords on the guitar, Sweeney started thinking about a career in music. She honed her craft by playing every Sunday night at the Poodle Dog Lounge on Burnet Road.

She might be the only singer ever to play the Poodle Dog and the Ryman Auditorium in the same month. "I just love it up there in Nashville," said Sweeney, who keeps an apartment in the 615 area code. "There's so much great history and you can get your work done." Sweeney's writing songs with her close friend Brennen Leigh, among others, for her followup to "Heartbreaker's Hall of Fame," the album she put out herself in 2006, then watched it get picked up for national distribution by Nashville's Big Machine.

Until then, Sweeney and her band (Cole Lee on guitar, Bruce Alford on drums, Geoff Queen on steel and Cody Martin on bass) are on the road, currently in the midst of a whirlwind tour with Rogers — 16 shows in 14 days — that has a stop at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in the middle.

"We've come too far to let up now," said the singer, who drips of spunk. She knows that the more folks hear her now, the better it will be in the long run. Sweeney should endorse an energy drink.

"I met Porter Wagonner just three months before he died and he said, 'you sing country, girl' and it meant so much to me," she said, sounding about as far from jaded as one with a Nashville deal could sound.

— Michael Corcoran