June 2022 Spotlight Series – James McMurtry

James McMurtry

James McMurtry is one of America’s most incisive songwriters — a storyteller whose novelistic detail and unflinching social eye set him apart. The son of novelist Larry McMurtry, he grew up surrounded by narrative, and it shows: his songs are populated by fully realized characters and hard small-town truths, delivered in a plainspoken Texas drawl. He arrived fully formed with 1989’s Too Long in the Wasteland, produced by John Mellencamp, and spent the decades that followed building a catalog admired by critics and fellow writers alike. Stephen King once called him “the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.” Albums like Childish Things (2005), home to the slow-burning anthem “We Can’t Make It Here,” and the road-worn epic “Choctaw Bingo” cemented his reputation as a chronicler of American life at its margins. Across later landmarks — Just Us Kids (2008), Complicated Game (2015), and The Horses and the Hounds (2021) — he has remained as sharp as ever, pairing literary lyrics with the muscle of a road-tested band. For this Dancing Rabbit Spotlight Show, McMurtry brings the full band to DWNTWN 312 in McAlester — an intimate room for an artist who fills every line with a lifetime of watching and listening.