The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy
James McMurtry
New West
20 June 2025
The brilliant singer-songwriter James McMurtry opens his latest ten-track opus,The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy,with a hard-rocking cover of somebody else’s song: Jon Dee Graham‘s “Laredo (Small Dark Something)”. It’s a classy move. The two Austin musicians are regulars at the city’s main dive, the Continental Club, and share aesthetic values. Graham has been in and out of the hospital lately and could use the royalty money to pay medical bills. (Please help if you can.)
McMurtry is personally familiar with the plight of musicians and the insurance industry. When I first interviewed him two decades ago, the first thing he wanted to discuss was President Obama’s Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), which enabled him to receive healthcare benefits. The 63-year-old performer still has insurance and is healthy, but he understands the importance of this issue for the musical community and his colleague, Jon Dee.
Be that as it may, McMurtry does a killer version of Graham’s tale of junkie misery, and that’s just the start! The following eight self-penned tracks show the Texan’s ability to address current issues and fanciful concerns with a sharp wit, a critical eye, and a heavy-hitting pulse. He moralizes without preaching by presenting the conflicting details of American life in the 21st century. Perhaps because he’s the son of a famous father, the author Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show), and he is the father of another notable singer-songwriter, Curtis McMurtry, James sees things generationally.
That’s most evident in “Sons of the Second Sons”, where he presents the importance of primogeniture in the settlement of the American South and the collective forgetting of the past, resulting in our current difficulties. An excellent example of his quotidian eloquence can be heard in the song’s closing, sung as if he’s spitting out the words: “Sons of the peasantry, telling ourselves we’re free / Sons of the loyal serfs / Salt of the blessed earth / In search of a savior / Sons of the second sons, products of genocide / Polishing up our guns, living in double-wides / Sons of the peasantry, telling ourselves we’re free / Sons of the pagan serfs / Salt of the fucking earth, in search of a Caesar.”
Several of the other tracks, including the title one and the fantastical tale about “Pinocchio in Vegas” where the old puppet had to “had to sue Walt Disney over copyright control” and “he’s a real boy now, his dick grows when he lies” are centered on father/son relations. McMurtry’s clever and funny, but he’s also a fine guitar player with a thunderous groove and a crack band. Besides being a terrific songwriter and singing lead vocals, he plays electric guitar, acoustic guitar, eight-string acoustic baritone guitar, and 12-string acoustic guitar.
Tim Holt plays electric guitar and provides backing vocals. Cornbread plays bass, Daren Hess is on drums, and Betty Soo provides backing vocals, as well as playing acoustic guitar, accordion, and tambourine. The record also features appearances by Sarah Jarosz, Charlie Sexton, Bonnie Whitmore, and Bukka Allen. Don Dixon (R.E.M., The Smithereens), who produced McMurtry’s 1995 album Where’d You Hide the Body, produced this record.
The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy is chock full of odd cultural references to everything from Weird Al’s “Another One Rides the Bus” to opening for Jason Isbell on “Sailing Away”. McMurtry combines verifiable facts with higher truths from memory and imagination in a rich and complex manner. He’s funny like Franz Kafka on open mic when he sings about 9/11 and the resulting American foreign policy on “Annie”, the current state of law enforcement on “South Texas Lawman”, and trying to get famous on “Back to Coeur d’Alene”. The dark details mix with the mundane facts of life to reveal the banal truths of existence.
The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy closes with another cover, Kris Kristofferson‘s “Broken Freedom Song”. McMurtry sings the raw lyrics about the end of hope with a gentle lilt. The humor is dry and lethal. This provides an appropriate ending to a fine album where present-day life connects to the past in a doleful yet meaningful manner.
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