Magic Bag Presents: James McMurtry

Name: Magic Bag Presents: James McMurtry
Start: 2025-09-14T19:00:00-05:00
Location: The Magic Bag

Schedule

Sun, 14 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

The Magic Bag | Ferndale, MI

Please Note:
*All shows are General Admission. *All shows are standing room only unless otherwise noted. *You will need your Valid Picture ID should use wish to consume adult beverages. *Ticket purchasers will be scanned-in when the Magic Bag doors open on your event day. *Please refer to the event listing for any age restrictions. *Included in your fee is a 3 % credit card processing fee.

Event Information:
Shows Are Standing Room OnlyA 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 hallucinationswere the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictionalcharacter.

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