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Michael Martin Murphey, Tall Grass & Cool Water (Rural Rhythm, 2011) |
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Michael Martin Murphey, Tall Grass & Cool Water (Rural Rhythm, 2011) |
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Strange as it may seem, for the most part, Murphey's continuing experiment works. This might be because he has been able to gather the prime movers of modern bluegrass, people like Sam Bush, Pat Flynn, Andy Leftwich and Ronnie McCroury, to help out. These pickers know what they're doing and Murphey, who has been recording since the '70s, has picked up a trick or two himself. The centerpiece of the album is "The James Gang Trilogy" in which he sings the stories of Cole Younger and Jesse and Frank James in three beautiful songs. The ballads on the album work just fine dressed up in bluegrass arrangements, but a couple of the other songs on the disc just don't fit comfortably into bluegrass. "Texas Cowboy" and especially "Way Out There" sound as though Murphey and the band were trying to get through them as quickly as possible. The music on both is frenetic and hard driving, which is too much of a contrast to the mood of the lyrics. Instead of the musical tension he was after, Murphey winds up with a touch of chaos. Still, Tall Grass & Cool Water dresses familiar tunes up in new clothes and makes you want to hang out with them again. by Michael Scott Cain
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Michael Martin Murphey's musical career stretches in a grand arc from the 1960s to the present. He helped pioneer Texas' "outlaw country" movement -- formed out of a fusion of honkytonk and folk sounds -- penning some of its most enduring songs ("Geronimo's Cadillac," "Cherokee Fiddle," "Backslider's Wine," the exquisite "Lost River") and showcasing a talent approximating that of such celebrated contemporaries as Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. Less interestingly, though with more commercial success, he scored a series of bland country-pop hits in the 1980s.
Since 1990, when Murphey released the acclaimed Cowboy Songs, he has devoted himself to the preservation of the culture and music of the American West. Well read and highly educated, Murphey, who is also a working rancher, knows whereof he sings. Tall Grass & Cool Water, his ninth Western-themed album, is the third in the ongoing "Buckaroo Bluegrass" series he's cut for Rural Rhythm. All nine recordings focus in varying proportions on authentic trail ballads, inauthentic but beloved Hollywood-cowboy songs, and Murphey originals. Tall Grass features only one original, "Partner to the Wind," which he has recorded before -- in a medley with Bob Nolan's "Cool Water," done as a separate cut on the present disc -- on last year's Lone Cowboy. The three songs comprising "The James Gang Trilogy" -- the traditionals "Cole Younger" and "Jesse James" plus Hal Ketchum/Gary Burr's "Frank James Farewell" -- appear in different arrangements on Cowboy Songs III (1993). This is, however, mere detail. As both art and entertainment, Tall Grass is an album of exceptional quality, in fact among my favorite roots albums of 2011 so far. The other two "Buckaroo Bluegrass" discs (2009 and 2010), which consist almost entirely of his own compositions, make for fine listening, but this one, which casts a broader net, feels special. Murphey has never sounded better. I might add, if it matters, that Tall Grass is only marginally bluegrass. The instruments (guitars, fiddles, banjos) are the kind associated with bands in the genre, but the arrangements usually amount to modern variations on the folk-stringband tradition. Scruggs-style banjo isn't entirely absent; it's there, for example, on another terrific Bob Nolan song, "Way Out There," a hobo's lament taking its thematic inspiration, I suspect, from Jimmie Rodgers's "Waiting for a Train." Mostly, though, the songs are presented in a setting that predates bluegrass, albeit without ever sounding dated. No question, everything is done in spectacular fashion. Songs I've known at least half my life -- "Santa Fe Trail," "Railroad Corral," the afore-mentioned "Cole Younger" -- shine, sparkle and feel like fresh acquaintances. I am especially grateful to Murphey for reviving Haywire Mac McClintock's seldom-heard comic ballad "Trusty Lariat," which boasts this memorable concluding couplet: "He killed three hundred passengers/ But thank God, he saved the child." Possibly, you'll have had to be subjected to too many mawkish child-centered Victorian-era songs to appreciate just how wickedly funny those lines are. The conscientiously researched liner notes will alert even hard-core American roots-music geeks to an interesting factoid or two that may have escaped them heretofore. Even so, one error begs correction. In the notes to "Cole Younger," while correctly remarking on the ubiquity of the melody in Anglo-Irish-American folksong, Murphey manages to confuse "bluegrass legend Charlie Monroe" (Bill's older brother) with the more obscure Charlie Moore. It was Moore, not Monroe, who put the "Kevin Barry" tune to "Legend of the Rebel Soldier." A significant talent in his own right, Moore died too young years ago, his name and work familiar only to the bluegrass hard-core. In the 1970s I saw him perform the song at a festival in Michigan, and it's still a treasured memory. by Jerome Clark |
