Facts and Stats: James McMurtry’s 2025 album The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy followed his 2021 acclaimed New West debut The Horses and the Hounds. It includes appearances by Sarah Jarosz (harmony vocal and banjo on “Annie”), Charlie Sexton (cum-bus, a Turkish instrument, on “Sons of the Second Sons”), Bonnie Whitmore (bass on “Back to Coeur d’Alene”), and Bukka Allen (organ on “The Color of Night” and “Sailing Away”) alongside his trusted backing band – BettySoo on accordion and backing vocals, Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on guitar and Daren Hess on drums.
Other contributors include Diana Burgess on cello for “South Texas Lawman”, “The Color of Night”, “Pinocchio in Vegas”, “Annie”, ”Sailing Away” and Curtis McMurtry with harmony vocal and banjo on “Pinocchio in Vegas”. Two covers, Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo (Small Dark Something)” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song” start and close the album respectively.
James McMurty is the son of novelist Larry McMurtry. The pencil sketch which makes up the album artwork was found in Larry McMurtry’s effects after his death and was drawn by Ken Kesey, probably on a visit with the Merry Pranksters, Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators.
The On Tour Edition features two previously unreleased tracks recorded live in Nashville, “South Texas Lawman” and the album’s title track, capturing McMurtry and his band in their element.
McMurtry’s debut album Too Long In The Wasteland, co-produced by John Mellencamp, was released in 1989; The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy is McMurtry’s fourteenth album (counting a “best of“ and live albums). Rolling Stone has classed McMurtry as “one of America’s greatest living songwriters” and Stephen King has said he “may be the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation”.
What The Critics Thought: Saving County Music (24 June 2025) said the album is a “distinctly songwriter-based old school alt-country album with some roots inflections, but with a lot of rock influences as well”. Americana UK (16 June 2025) stated – “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”. Louder Than War (20 June 2025) noted that ”this is a well-sequenced and exquisitely produced record, and given that James McMurtry’s been delivering this calibre of song-writing – full of stories of emotional gravitas and musical virtuosity – for more than three decades, it takes a truly churlish heathen to dismiss him as just another anonymous American roots/folk artist”.
What We Think: there is much to appreciate on this great album, with turns of phrase and singalong melodies likely to stick in the head. There’s a witty update on Pinnochio with “Pinocchio in Vegas” and a memorable history come protest song, “Sons of the Second Sons” which takes a mixed view of the USA.
Perhaps what stands out most is the high level of craft. Above all, McMurtry is a fine writer, evidenced with poetic lyrics like “the color of night Is a sixty watt bulb on a cinder block wall” (“The Color of Night”) and a couplet like “D.C. beltway in this five-thirty gloom/opening for Isbell in some cavernous room” (“Sailing Away”). The music is also more than up to scratch, as evidenced by the live versions of “South Texas Lawman”, which grew out of a line from a poem by T.D. Hobart, a friend of the McMurtry family, and the title track which both references the late McMurtry Senior’s hallucinations and takes a defiant stand against conventionalism.
Formats: the On Tour Edition is available to download and stream.
Label: New West
Release Date: 4 SEP 2026
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