James McMurtry does not talk much, and he does not volunteer myth. He answers questions carefully, sometimes obliquely, often economically, as if every word costs something. That reserve has become part of his public character, as recognizable as the stark clarity of his songs. McMurtry is a listener first, a keen observer of language and vernacular, and a writer who has always trusted what he hears more than what he declares. It’s why his songs feel overheard rather than announced—and why, decades into his career, he remains one of America’s most quietly formidable storytellers.
That reputation has only deepened with The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, a record widely hailed as one of his strongest. The new album reinforces his standing without leaning on legacy. Critics have praised its density and moral clarity, its refusal to blink. Some have called it a career-best collection of narratives. McMurtry seems unmoved by the applause. Praise is not the point. Precision is what matters most to him.
That insistence on accuracy—emotional, linguistic, moral—runs through both his catalog and his conversation. Take the long-sidelined song “12 O’Clock Whistle,” a track McMurtry admits he hasn’t played in years. The reason is practical, not performative. “Some moron put that thing on the radio, which I never intended,” he said, recalling how the song’s context was flattened by careless airplay. “You can’t hear the context of the song at rush hour in Akron or Dayton, Ohio.” The problem wasn’t ambiguity—it was misuse. “That N-word is hateful no matter how you say it unless you’re Black. So, you know, I don’t sing it.” It’s a characteristically blunt conclusion, rooted in responsibility rather than revisionism.
McMurtry’s songs often hinge on absence—lost people, vanished places, conversations that can no longer be continued. He traces one such line back to a moment on the road with guitarist Tim Holt. “One of the weird things is people are gone,” he said. “You can’t call them up and ask them who your neighbors were in the late ’50s, early ’60s.” His father’s death in 2021 sharpened that awareness. McMurtry remembers the long drives they took together, from Virginia to Texas, the landscape unfolding mile by mile. “There’s just all kinds of spots along the road,” he said, mentioning Archer County, Texas, where his father grew up. Travel, for McMurtry, is never just movement—it’s memory resurfacing in fragments.
That sense of lived-in memory animates “Lights of Cheyenne,” one of the quieter gems in his catalog. The song’s narrator, an abused truck stop waitress, was inspired by a woman McMurtry and his father Larry encountered in Montana during the 1970s. She was a rancher named Ellen, a survivor of an abusive marriage. “Somehow I transformed her character into a truck stop waitress,” McMurtry said. In his imagination, she sits near a fictional stop west of Cheyenne, gazing toward the mountains, wondering if she really wants to go home. The geography may be invented, but the emotional terrain is exact—classic McMurtry, grounded in empathy rather than explanation.
McMurtry’s career has always been shaped by such transformations—turning observation into story without sanding off the rough edges. His early gigs were modest and strange, from backing a cowboy fiddler near Benson, Arizona, to playing rooms where the headliner turned out to be Monday Night Football—literally. “When the game started, my set was over,” he recalled dryly. In San Antonio, he learned the economics of survival: Jimmy Buffett covers to satisfy bar managers, original songs slipped in where possible. He didn’t finish a song he could really play until his mid-twenties. Even then, some things arrived at the last second. “I wrote that bridge on the way to the studio the day we recorded it,” he said of an early track called “Talkin’ at the Texaco.” It felt like a throwaway. It stayed.
Politics, like everything else, enters McMurtry’s work not as slogan but as consequence. He bristles at the idea that he has somehow “changed.” “My positions have not changed,” he said. “The spectrum shifted hard right during the Reagan years and never came back.” He’s pragmatic about evolution, too, acknowledging that some of his earlier populist instincts no longer hold. “There were downsides,” he said of the old industrial, Rust Belt order. “The air quality in Pittsburgh was pretty poor back then.” Songs like “We Can’t Make It Here” endure not because they argue, but because they observe—registering the human cost of policy without pretending to solve it.
That resistance to simplification extends to music itself. McMurtry rejects the idea that songs should avoid politics altogether. “If you keep politics out of music,” he said, “that means you can’t listen to Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan or Toby Keith or Merle Haggard.” Guthrie, in particular, looms large—not just musically, but linguistically. Listening to the Dust Bowl Ballads, McMurtry heard something familiar. “His accent was very similar to that of my relatives,” he said. “It just sounded like one of my cousins singing.”
That ear for speech—for phrases that are disappearing—is central to his writing. “I try to hang on to stuff that I don’t hear anymore,” he said, recalling lines and turns of phrase from his youth in Virginia that once passed without notice. The goal isn’t nostalgia. It’s preservation. Language, like landscape, erodes quietly if no one is paying attention.
Despite decades of praise, McMurtry remains uneasy with certain labels. Especially one. “It’s not really poetry,” he insisted. Songs, he explains, are built for singing, not reading. Vowels matter. Tongue-twisters kill melodies. Meaning bends to sound. “You get a better song if you let it say what it wants to say,” he said. Sermons don’t last, he said. Songs do.
Asked how he wants to be written about, McMurtry demurs. “I don’t want to be written about.” It’s almost a joke. Almost. In the end, he returns to craft, to humility before the form that has carried him this far. “A song is written to be sung,” he said. “That changes everything.”
Photo credit: credit Mary Keating-Bruton
About the author: A devout lover of singer-songwriters, mountain hikes, colorful cuisine, and eccentric artists, Brian D'Ambrosio lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For story ideas and suggestions, he may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com.