I made a Christmas album a couple of years ago and just put it out on my Web site. It kind of smacked of this flavor. All of the reviews said it was Western swing even when it was Christmas standards.

Bogguss is describing how genre identity can be as much about arrangement, instrumentation, and rhythmic feel as it is about song choice. Even when she recorded familiar Christmas standards, critics heard “Western swing” because the performances carried that stylistic “flavor”—likely through swing rhythms, fiddle/steel textures, and dance-band phrasing associated with the tradition. The remark also points to an artist’s autonomy in the early web era: she released the album informally through her own website rather than via a conventional label rollout, yet it still entered public discourse through reviews. Implicitly, she’s noting how listeners and reviewers categorize music, sometimes overriding an artist’s intended framing (holiday album) with a stylistic label (Western swing).