James McMurtry

Name: James McMurtry
Start: 2026-01-17T20:30:00-06:00
Location: 330 East Grayson Street San Antonio TX 78215

Schedule

Sat, 17 Jan, 2026 at 08:30 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

330 East Grayson Street San Antonio TX 78215 | San Antonio, TX

Get your tickets today for James McMurtry
Doors at 7:30pm Show at 8:30pm
Curtis McMurtry, Diana Burgess opens the show
All-In Pricing TICKETS: Advance GA $32.20/ Day Of Show GA $38.17 / Reserved Booths $272.45 (admission not included) / Table Upgrades $135.31 (admission not included)
Ticket prices include all fees except taxes
LIMITED SEATED SHOW - Expect to Stand - NO Seating GUARANTEED. Any Seating Available is on a First Come, First Served Basis. NO REFUNDS all sales final.
PURCHASE OF BOOTH DOES NOT INCLUDE ADMITTANCE TO SHOW - ONLY RESERVES THE BOOTH (Booths can seat up to 4 people some may hold more. HOWEVER the number people in the booth is NOT guaranteed.) You and your party will all still need a General Admission ticket to get in to the show.
PURCHASE OF TABLE UPGRADE DOES NOT INCLUDE ADMITTANCE TO SHOW - ONLY RESERVES A TABLE (Tables can seat up to 4 people) You and your party will all still need a General Admission ticket to get in to the show.
Reserved Booths and Table Upgrades – Please note that at times, views may be partially obstructed by guests standing on the floor between the booths/tables and the stage.
Ages 18 and up - All Minors Will Be Charged an Additional $14.28 At the Door. 17 & Under Admitted with Parent or Guardian Only.

Tickets for James McMurtry go fast so get yours today!
James McMurtry -
Website [http://www.jamesmcmurtry.com/] -- Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/JamesMcMurtry] -- Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/jamesmcmurtryofficial/] -- Twitter [https://twitter.com/JamesMcMurtry]
The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy
A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he can afford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a wandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, he teases vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—but sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young 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’s past: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time,” he says, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects little ideas 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 by gravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelings of obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight’d stay at
our house way back in the ‘70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this poem 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, and that 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 who appear 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 who doesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at odds with the gravity of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me about his hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died, but 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.”

Curtis McMurtry -
Website [https://www.curtismcmurtrymusic.com] -- Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/curtismcmurtrymusic/] -- Instagram [http://instagram.com/curtismcmurtry]
Curtis McMurtry is a singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist from Austin, TX. Influenced by Fiona Apple, Billy Strayhorn and Tom Waits, Curtis' songs combine sinister lyrics with sophisticated orchestration. His latest album, The Pollen & The Rot released on May 31st 2024, and is the first of four forthcoming albums inspired by seasons (in this case, spring). Curtis' music has been featured on NPR's Weekend Edition, and his song "Wrong Inflection" was included in the soundtrack for comedian Tig Notaro's Amazon Prime series One Mississippi.

Curtis was born and raised in Austin, Texas and grew up surrounded by local musicians. He studied music composition and ethnomusicology in college, primarily writing contemporary chamber works for banjo and strings. After graduation, Curtis moved to Nashville to sharpen his songwriting by co-writing with elder statesmen including the legendary Guy Clark. He has since moved back to Austin where he performs as a trio with cellist Diana Burgess (of Mother Falcon) [https://motherfalconmusic.bandcamp.com/] and upright bassist Taylor Turner. Curtis' goal in songwriting and composition has been to integrate the Classical and Jazz orchestration techniques he learned in college with the lyric-driven, Texas singer-songwriter style he absorbed growing up.

Diana Burgess -
Website [https://www.dianaburgessmusic.com] -- Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/DianaBurgessMusic/] -- Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/dhburgess/]
Diana Burgess is a cellist, educator and composer based in Austin, TX. Diana holds a Bachelor's of Music in Cello Performance at UT Austin and focuses primarily on writing, performing, touring and collaborating with artists in a variety of genres.

Since 2010 Diana has been a member of Austin orchestral pop band Mother Falcon, and with the group has toured throughout the United States and Canada, performed for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, and collaborated with artists including Ben Sollee, Kaki King, Amanda Palmer, Todd Reynolds, and Gina Chavez. In addition to performing, Diana contributes to the writing process in Mother Falcon, most notably in the creation of an original score for their collaboration with Glass Half Full Theater in a production of Petra and the Wolf, a Texas-based adaptation of Peter and the Wolf, which began touring the US in 2017.

Diana is the co-founder, outreach director and cello teacher for the Mother Falcon Music Lab, a unique music education program encouraging young musicians to discover their creative voice through collaborative songwriting.