James McMurtry Electric Trio
In a desperate attempt to classify McMurtry’s music for readers, the terms Americana, Country/folk, Country rock, and Roots Rock may be helpful. At the show, he played both solo acoustic folky songs, but also rocked up, electric power-trio songs like “Choctaw Bingo.”
Born in Texas but raised in Virginia, the 41-year-old comes by his novel-like lyrics through heredity. According to Steve Huey at Allmusic.com, James “comes from a literary family; his father, novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, gave James his first guitar at age seven, and his mother, an English professor, taught him how to play it. McMurtry began performing his own songs while a student at the University of Arizona and continued to do so after returning home and taking a job as a bartender.”
James McMurtry’s latest CD, Saint Mary of the Woods, is his sixth since 1989. It takes the listener on an eye-opening voyage along American back roads. It displays bare snapshots of people and places that are often overlooked. “People are only concerned with the getting there, not the going,” says James. “I’m more interested in the going. I look during the journey. Every once in a while, we get off the interstate and go through America, where we see the weird things, things people don’t notice because they don’t look.”
By Skyy Dobro
