James McMurtry “The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy”

Never a shortage of incorrigible characters and unsettling images.

For 36 years and 14 albums, Texas songwriter James McMurtry has, in a sense, followed in his father’s footsteps, presenting his brand of country noir music as Larry McMurtry embraced literature in novels like “Lonesome Dove.” “The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy” is McMurtry’s second release on New West Records, coming four years after he pushed at the framework and notions of roots music with “The Horse and the Hounds.” The new album features appearances by Sarah Jarosz, Charlie Sexton, Bonnie Whitmore, Bukka Allen, and others, as well as his familiar backing band with BettySoo on accordion & backing vocals, Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on guitar, and Daren Hess on drums.

There’s an unhurried sturdiness and maturity to McMurtry’s music. Mostly mid-tempo, these are songs that lope and shuffle along with moored pacing and an organic feel that never places guitar pyrotechnics, of which he is more than capable, over maintaining the story at the centre of the songs. After a first listen, you are inclined to begin scrutinising the songs for the occasional glimpse of what lies beneath the surface impassivity.

“You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song. A song can come from anywhere,” McMurtry puts forth. To his credit, he is still finding new characters and new ways of telling novelistic stories.

As varied as they are, McMurtry’s new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s past: a rough pencil sketch by Ken Kesey that serves as the album cover, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the legendary writer Larry McMurtry, an old poem by a family friend. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, McMurtry teases vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana but sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad, often in the same breath, “The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy” adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence.

‘Second Sons of Second Sons’ is a lean, direct, sharply-written song with an emotional heft and some of McMurtry’s most evocative insights into the American Dream of sons following their fathers in building the country. His son Curtis McMurtry supplies harmony vocals and banjo on the updating of the fable of the wooden boy with the long nose, er, dick on ‘Pinocchio in Vegas.’ He’s cleaning out the marks at the tables, and like an old Seinfeld skit, “he don’t even need the money; he’s just in it out of spite.” ‘South Texas Lawman’ is a brilliantly restrained song that seems simple but gradually reveals a chasmic depth in the malaise of a career in law enforcement nearing its end. “The hours were long and lonesome / the paperwork’s a bitch / His years are empty bottles now / tossed off in the ditch.”

If songs like ‘Back to Coeur d’Alene’ were easy to write, countless Texas troubadours would have written them by now. The life of the travelling musician and the evils of the music business are about as tired subject matter as you can find outside of lost love, but over Red Young’s smooth organ, McMurtry tells the down-and-dirty story: “If my chances are minimal / I’m still giving it all I’ve got / Why do I feel like a criminal / Gotta get known …. Gotta, gotta, gotta.” ‘The Color of Night’ is especially strong, a chugger that builds up a head of steam with a fantastic riff and then coasts deliriously off that momentum for another minute or two. McMurtry’s character is trying to please his Hollywood girlfriend, who is less accustomed to him than being kept in the manner she is accustomed to. “Your candid admission barely thickens the plot / Seems you miss what you’re missing more than you want what you’ve got.”

The title track was sourced from his father’s hallucinations as he suffered from dementia before his death. You wonder if McMurtry worries that one day in the future, he’ll be haunted by the black dog and the wandering boy, who will sit at the corner of his bed “Watching for the things that haunt / They ought to both go away when I take my meds / But they don’t.”

McMurtry declared, “The album title and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me about his hallucinations, but he hadn’t 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.”

Free of pretences but laden with expectations, this album offers a raw, unfiltered release of longing, restlessness, and ageing. Driven by relatively straightforward yet undeniably moving, guitar-driven arrangements, this is roots rock at its most cathartic. It is evident in ‘Annie,’ with McMurtry’s distressed, defeatist cries of “Not much of nothing on TV” and his solitary admission, “I changed the channel, went up to bed only to wake in the morning and find the World Trade Center gone.” The violence is tempered by lilting harmony vocals and light acoustic guitar from Jarosz.

In both its loudest and its quietest moments, “The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy” has few parallels in the power of its songs. Its two covers – Jon Dee Graham’s ‘Laredo (Small Dark Something)’ and Kris Kristoffersson’s ‘Broken Freedom Song’ act as the parenthesis holding the collection together, coming in as a junkie tweaking and going out with a wounded soldier’s homecoming. McMurtry’s gift is his reductive way of presenting a narrative so that his characters, faced with the usual avalanche of anguish, are always laying the breadcrumbs for breakdowns coming to which we all can relate.