James McMurtry

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James McMurtry The Black Dog & the Wandering BoyA Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he can afford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a wandering boy and hums Weird Al songs in his head. These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtrys eleventh album, The Black Dog rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonicabut sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite him as a formative influence. As varied as they are, these new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his familys past: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the writer Larry McMurtry. Its something I do all the time, he says, but usually I draw from my own scraps. As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects little ideas and hangs on to them for years, sometimes even decades. South Texas Lawman grew out of a line from a poem by a friend of the McMurtry clan, T.D. Hobart. Driven by gravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, its a careful study of a man whose feelings of obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. Dwightd stay at our house way back in the 70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this poem about his fathers attitude toward South Texas. He wrote it down on cardboard, and I came across it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback, and that was the seed of the song. Ive lost the poem since then. The rumbling title track, a kind of squirrelly blues, features two mysterious figures who appear only to those slipping from reality, yet its never grim nor especially despairing. Instead, McMurtry namechecks a Weird Al deep cut and depicts a tortured soul who doesnt have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at odds with the gravity of the source material. The title of the album and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me about his hallucinations. Hed gone into dementia for a while before he died, but hadnt mentioned to me anything about seeing things. She told me his favorite hallucinations were the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional character. read morespecial guest: Betty Soo