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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260626T190000
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UID:1170-1782500400-1782511200@sportsmensbuffalo.com
SUMMARY:JAMES McMURTRY & The MARTIAL LAW REVIEW - Sportsmens Park
DESCRIPTION:Sportsmens presents \nJAMES McMURTRY & The MARTIAL LAW REVIEW \nwsg/ BettySoo \nFriday\, June 26\, 2026 $30.00 + Online fee \n5pm Doors\, 7pm Showtime Rain or shine \n \n \nJames McMurtry \nThe Black Dog & the Wandering Boy \nA Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A\nmechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he can\nafford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a\nwandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strange\nand richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album\, The Black\nDog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller\, he teases\nvivid worlds out of small details\, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of\nAmericana—rolling guitars\, barroom harmonies\, traces of banjo and harmonica—but\nsound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same\nbreath\, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as\nyoung songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite him as a formative influence. \nAs varied as they are\, these new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s\npast: a stray sketch\, an old poem by a family friend\, the hallucinations experienced by\nhis father\, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time\,” he says\, “but\nusually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do\, McMurtry collects little\nideas and hangs on to them for years\, sometimes even decades. “South Texas Lawman”\ngrew out of a line from a poem by a friend of the McMurtry clan\, T.D. Hobart. Driven by\ngravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section\, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelings\nof obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight’d stay at\nour house way back in the ‘70s\, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this\npoem about his father’s attitude toward South Texas. He wrote it down on cardboard\,\nand I came across it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback\, and\nthat was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.” \nThe rumbling title track\, a kind of squirrelly blues\, features two mysterious figures who\nappear only to those slipping from reality\, yet it’s never grim nor especially despairing.\nInstead\, McMurtry namechecks a “Weird Al” deep cut and depicts a tortured soul who\ndoesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at odds\nwith the gravity of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes from\nmy stepmother\, Faye. After my dad passed\, she asked me if he ever talked to me about\nhis hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died\, but hadn’t\nmentioned to me anything about seeing things. She told me his favorite hallucinations \nwere the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional\ncharacter.” \nSoon McMurtry had enough of these songs for a new record. “It happened like all my\nrecords happened. It’d been too long since I’d had a record that the press could write\nabout and get people to come out to my shows. It was time.” What was different this\ntime was the presence of his old friend Don Dixon\, who produced McMurtry’s third\nalbum\, Where You’d Hide the Body?\, back in 1995. “A couple of years ago I quit\nproducing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. I\nneeded to go back to producer school\, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game\,\nand then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr.\nDixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what he’s learned over the last thirty\nyears.” During sessions at Wire Recording in Austin\, McMurtry observed firsthand\nDixon’s grasp of digital recording technology as well as his instinctual approach to\ntracking. “What Don’s really good at is being able to sense when it’s happening. He can\nhear when it’s going down. If I’m producing myself and I don’t have him\, I have to do\nthree takes and then go in and listen to them. Listening to those three takes can take\nabout 15 minutes. So Dixon’s ability to know when it’s happening is crucial\, because it\ncan cut 15 minutes out of the day. That can really save a session\, because you only have\nso many hours in the day and only so much energy.\nWorking with McMurtry’s trusted backing band—Cornbread on bass\, Tim Holt on\nguitar\, Daren Hess on drums\, BettySoo on backing vocals—they worked to create\nsomething that sounds spontaneous\, as though he’s writing the songs as you hear them.\nThey were open to odd experiments\, weird whims\, and happy accidents\, such as the\ncover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo” that opens the album. It’s an opioid blues:\ntestimony from a part-time junkie losing a weekend to dope. “We were playing a benefit\nfor Jon Dee at the Hole in the Wall there in Austin\, and we thought it’d be good if we\nplayed one of his songs. We rehearsed the song in the studio\, and it sounded good. The\ndrums were ready. We’d already got the sounds up. Might as well record it.” \n“Laredo” is one of a pair of covers that bookend The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy\,\nthe other being Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song.” “I did that one a few weeks\nafter our initial sessions. It was just me and BettySoo\, then we added drums and bass\nlater on. Kris had just passed not too long before we recorded it. I guess that’s why I was\nthinking about him.” Like Hobart’s poem\, it’s a bit of inspiration excavated from deep\nwithin his own life. “Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the first\nperson that I recognized as a songwriter. I hadn’t really thought about where songs\ncame from\, but I started listening to Kristofferson as a songwriter and thinking\, How do\nyou do this? He was actually the second concert I saw. I was nine. He and the band were \nhaving such a good time\, and that really solidified for me that this was what I wanted to\ndo with my life.” \nOnce the album was mixed\, mastered\, and sequenced\, McMurtry recalled a rough pencil\nsketch he had found a few years earlier in his father’s effects. It seemed like it might\nmake a good cover. “I knew it was of me\, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I asked my\nmom and my stepdad\, and finally I asked my stepmom\, Faye\, who said it looked like\nKen Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s. She was married to Ken for forty years.” The Merry\nPrankster’s—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often to\nvisit Larry McMurtry and his family. “I don’t remember their first visit\, the one\ndocumented in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was too young\, but I do\nremember a couple of Ken’s visits. I guess he drew it on one of those later stops. I\nremembered it and thought it would be the perfect art\, but I had to go back through the\nstorage locker. It’s a miracle that I found it again.”\nIt’s a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration. Even the\nsongwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or where the songs will take\nhim. “You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character\, maybe you can\nget a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure\, maybe you can get a song. A\nsong can come from anywhere\, but the main inspiration is fear. Specifically\, fear of\nirrelevance. If you don’t have songs\, you don’t have a record. If you don’t have a record\,\nyou don’t have a tour. You gotta keep putting out work.”
URL:https://sportsmensbuffalo.com/single/james-mcmurtry-the-martial-law-review-sportsmens-park/
LOCATION:Sportsmens Park\, 340 Amherst Street\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14207\, United States
CATEGORIES:Americana,Country,Genre,Sportsmens Park,Sportsmens Park,Stages
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