James McMurtry

A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. Amechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he canafford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and awandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strangeand richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The BlackDog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, he teasesvivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements ofAmericana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—butsound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the samebreath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence asyoung 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 family’spast: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, the hallucinations experienced byhis father, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time,” he says, “butusually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects littleideas 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 bygravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelingsof obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight’d stay atour house way back in the ‘70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote thispoem about his father’s 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, andthat was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.”The rumbling title track, a kind of squirrelly blues, features two mysterious figures whoappear only to those slipping from reality, yet it’s never grim nor especially despairing.Instead, McMurtry namechecks a “Weird Al” deep cut and depicts a tortured soul whodoesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at oddswith the gravity of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes frommy stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me abouthis hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died, but hadn’tmentioned 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 fictionalcharacter.”Soon McMurtry had enough of these songs for a new record. “It happened like all myrecords happened. It’d been too long since I’d had a record that the press could writeabout and get people to come out to my shows. It was time.” What was different thistime was the presence of his old friend Don Dixon, who produced McMurtry’s thirdalbum, Where You’d Hide the Body?, back in 1995. “A couple of years ago I quitproducing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. Ineeded to go back to producer school, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game,and then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr.Dixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what he’s learned over the last thirtyyears.” During sessions at Wire Recording in Austin, McMurtry observed firsthandDixon’s grasp of digital recording technology as well as his instinctual approach totracking. “What Don’s really good at is being able to sense when it’s happening. He canhear when it’s going down. If I’m producing myself and I don’t have him, I have to dothree takes and then go in and listen to them. Listening to those three takes can takeabout 15 minutes. So Dixon’s ability to know when it’s happening is crucial, because itcan cut 15 minutes out of the day. That can really save a session, because you only haveso many hours in the day and only so much energy.Working with McMurtry’s trusted backing band—Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt onguitar, Daren Hess on drums, BettySoo on backing vocals—they worked to createsomething that sounds spontaneous, as though he’s writing the songs as you hear them.They were open to odd experiments, weird whims, and happy accidents, such as thecover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo” that opens the album. It’s an opioid blues:testimony from a part-time junkie losing a weekend to dope. “We were playing a benefitfor Jon Dee at the Hole in the Wall there in Austin, and we thought it’d be good if weplayed one of his songs. We rehearsed the song in the studio, and it sounded good. Thedrums were ready. We’d already got the sounds up. Might as well record it.”“Laredo” is one of a pair of covers that bookend The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy,the other being Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song.” “I did that one a few weeksafter our initial sessions. It was just me and BettySoo, then we added drums and basslater on. Kris had just passed not too long before we recorded it. I guess that’s why I wasthinking about him.” Like Hobart’s poem, it’s a bit of inspiration excavated from deepwithin his own life. “Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the firstperson that I recognized as a songwriter. I hadn’t really thought about where songscame from, but I started listening to Kristofferson as a songwriter and thinking, How doyou do this? He was actually the second concert I saw. I was nine. He and the band were

having such a good time, and that really solidified for me that this was what I wanted todo with my life.”Once the album was mixed, mastered, and sequenced, McMurtry recalled a rough pencilsketch he had found a few years earlier in his father’s effects. It seemed like it mightmake a good cover. “I knew it was of me, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I asked mymom and my stepdad, and finally I asked my stepmom, Faye, who said it looked likeKen Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s. She was married to Ken for forty years.” The MerryPrankster’s—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often tovisit Larry McMurtry and his family. “I don’t remember their first visit, the onedocumented in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was too young, but I doremember a couple of Ken’s visits. I guess he drew it on one of those later stops. Iremembered it and thought it would be the perfect art, but I had to go back through thestorage locker. It’s a miracle that I found it again.”It's a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration. Even thesongwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or where the songs will takehim. “You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you canget a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song. Asong can come from anywhere, but the main inspiration is fear. Specifically, fear ofirrelevance. If you don’t have songs, you don’t have a record. If you don’t have a record,you don’t have a tour. You gotta keep putting out work.”

BettySoo’s vocal prowess is a thing of wonder.  A world-class instrument of deft phrasing and purity, a voice that knows when to hold back and when to dive in.  At her own live shows, taking a verse onstage with friends or singing harmonies in sessions with Austin’s finest, BettySoo sings with consummate loveliness and self-assurance.  A voice that knows the roots of American music inside and out; coming from a most unexpected place – a diminutive Korean-American with a deceptively girl-next-door demeanor. 

Touring the unforgiving circuit of listening rooms, clubs and festivals, BettySoo has mastered the art of performance.  A funny anecdote sets up a song of heartbreak and need; a witty rejoinder belies the dark truths that underpin much of her work.