Last year’s The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy saw James McMurtry return to his past, but the hard-hitting album also offered undeniable proof that the Texan is made for these times.
McMurtry, who plays Shank Hall on Sunday, came up with the song from which the album takes its name after his stepmother told him about hallucinations his father, the legendary writer Larry McMurtry, had while suffering from dementia before his death.
The song is tender, defiant and sometimes comical: “The black dog and the wandering boy come around every night/ The wandering boy never gets any older, the black dog doesn’t bite/ He just sits on the floor at the corner of the bed /Watching for the things that haunt/ They ought to both go away when I take my meds/ But they don’t.”
Approaching a song from the circumstances about his father that McMurtry did seem like they could have brought up sad emotions, but he says that was not the case…