Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. Singer-songwriter James McMurtry will be performing with his band the Martial Law Review in Eureka Springs Saturday, Sept. 5, as part of the 79th annual Original Ozark Folk Festival. Ozarks at Large's Sophia Nourani recently spoke with James McMurtry over the phone. He's currently on tour performing his 2025 album release "The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy." He says he first began playing the guitar when he was seven.
McMurtry: My mother taught me the chords. I wanted to be Johnny Cash when I grew up. And as a youngster, my mother got tired of hearing me, you know, listen to me beat on that guitar, not even knowing how to tune it or anything. So she taught me to tune it and taught me three or four chords. I just kind of picked up the rest as I went along.
Nourani: How did you, kind of going off of that, discover your passion for songwriting?
McMurtry: I was about nine years old, and my stepdad got ahold of a copy of Kris Kristofferson's first record. Kristofferson was the first one that was identified to me as a songwriter. Up until that point, I hadn't given any thought to where songs came from. You know, like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan I thought was okay. I thought he sang funny, but I knew Cash liked him, so he must be cool. And then Kristofferson came along and I started actually listening to the construction of his lyrics. He, more than anybody, probably influenced me as a writer.
Nourani: When did you kind of start focusing on your specific sound that you've curated to today?
McMurtry: It evolved over time, and I started working with bands in the mid-'90s or so. Got away from the solo thing and, you know, your sound changes with different band members that, you know, come in and out of your orbit.
Nourani: Well, speaking of bands, can you tell me about how you first began playing with the Martial Law Review, and tell me a little bit about what it's like performing with them?
McMurtry: Well, I mean, we just adopted that name a little while ago because I figured that's where we're going. For one, back in the early 2000s, we called ourselves the Heartless Bastards. But then there was another band out of Mississippi or somewhere, out of Ohio, I think, that also had that name. And they understood that they had to trademark it. I didn't know that. So, and then they got bigger than us. So we let them have the Heartless Bastards.
And mostly we just hadn't had a name. It was just James McMurtry. But yeah, I think it was last fall sometime I started calling us the Martial Law Review.
Nourani: I like it. And you've been playing with those folks for a while, then?
McMurtry: Yeah. Well, Tim Holt has been with me for nearly 30 years. Yeah. Well, you know, 25 years. And then Cornbread, the bass player, he's kind of the new guy. He's been in the band about 12, 15 years. And we have a sub drummer right now. A regular drummer had surgery and has had to stay home for a while. But so right now we got Craig Bagby playing drums.
Nourani: Do you have just a, you know, a personal preference to performing with a band versus performing solo, typically?
McMurtry: I prefer a band, really. The energy is better. It's just sort of circular, you know. You kind of bounce the vibe off the crowd and around, you know, and off the band members. With the solo, it's more linear. It's just you and the crowd. And sometimes you can't tell what they're thinking. They're not moving. They're just listening to you.
Nourani: I know you've probably been to Arkansas before, just kind of going off of your lyrics and your work and perhaps your connection to the region.
McMurtry: Yeah, I've been back and forth through them for, you know, 30-some years since we've been touring. We play Fayetteville pretty regularly, and Little Rock every so often. I enjoy playing anywhere.
Nourani: Kind of transitioning from the performing side of things, I wanted to ask you about "The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy." Can you start by just kind of telling me about how you conceptualized that album, how it first kind of started for you?
McMurtry: Well, I make records when my tour draw starts to fall off, and the business model has kind of upended during the time I've been recording and performing. In the late '80s, early '90s, you know, we would make records and we would tour to support record sales, and the goal was to sell enough records to live off the royalties. Well, that never really happened for me, but I got a toehold in the touring business and learned to tour cheap so that we could actually profit on the tours.
And now we make records mostly to advertise tour dates, because, you know, record sales don't amount to much of anything anymore. Hard product is gone. The royalty for downloads and streaming is next to nothing. It's not like it was with CDs and cassettes, you know? There's no physical product. So, you know, if we put a record out, then you guys will talk about us on the radio and, you know, the print media people will write about us and people will know we're coming to town and they'll hopefully come buy a seat.
So, you know, at some point my tour draw kind of started falling off and it was time to make another record. So I just started finishing songs that I had, you know, kind of a scrap pile of half-written songs laying around. And the title track, "Black Dog and the Wandering Boy," came about because my father passed away and my stepmother asked me, you know, she said, did Larry ever talk to you about his hallucinations? I said no. She said, he never told you about the black dog and the wandering boy? I said, no, but I'm stealing that. So you took those characters and applied them to a fictional character. And the guy, the narrator, is not my father or anything like him. But I did get those characters from him.
Nourani: Do you want to add anything perhaps about the process of recording, or the sound in particular?
McMurtry: Well, this record I used, I got Don Dixon to produce, and I worked with Don 30 years ago on my fourth record or third record, I guess, "Where Did You Hide the Body?" And I just, I liked the way he works in the studio. He's very efficient and likes to track live. He likes to look for the magic take, so he doesn't use a click track. He doesn't really build the tracks as he goes. It's more like a live performance with a little bit added here and there. And he saves you a lot of time because he can tell when the good take's happening.
Whereas if I'm producing myself, it takes me a lot of time, because I go in there, I'll do three takes, and then I'll go in the control room and listen to those three takes. Well, that takes 15 minutes, because it's about five minutes per take. And Don, he'll be listening. You know, you get through the take and you start to go in the other room and say, no, stay right there. Just punch that spot there and punch that ending and you got it. And we'll start overdubbing. That just saved me 15 minutes because I don't have to go back and listen to them. Yeah. And there's only so many 15-minute increments in a day, and you're paying for that studio time, so in that sense it helps.
Nourani: I think you've kind of already touched on it already, but I wanted to ask, you know, just given your experience you mentioned in the music industry, you've been in the game for a long time, your thoughts on just how things have shifted perhaps, you know, holistically. Is there anything that stands out to you in particular about music and performing and just the industry of that, for musicians and artists and also potentially for the audience as well, if you have any comments or thoughts on that?
McMurtry: I don't know that, I mean, the changes in the industry, I don't know that they've affected my business all that much, because I'm geared towards live performance. Most of our shows are club dates, and that's what we do year in and year out. And we've gotten to the point where we can do that, whether we have a record out or not, whether the radio plays it or not. You know, we're well enough established, we can probably keep going.
Our numbers seem to be holding up despite high gas prices and, you know, economic woes in the country. That will probably change. You know, nobody's recession proof. The music industry at large used to think it was recession proof. Well, they're not anymore.
Nourani: Just kind of going off of that, do you potentially have any advice for musicians or artists who are trying to kind of break into the industry, who don't have that name perhaps, or that familiarity with them, but still want to kind of go out there? Just from your perspective, do you have any tips for them?
McMurtry: No, it's really tough. My son might have some tips, because he toured for a while doing mostly house concerts, you know, to get to his club gigs. And that all went away with COVID, because, you know, my touring is based on the club business, which is, you know, the bar business, basically. I'm trying to get people into bars so they'll drink so the register will ring.
Well, house concert thing was mostly rich people that like music, and so they'd sell 50 tickets to their friends and host you in their house and put you up for the night. And that, you know, that gets you to the festival gig or whatever your anchor dates are. But during lockdown that never really came back. So my son Curtis has had a much tougher road to hoe than I have. He's still gigging around Austin a good bit, but he doesn't tour much because there's no way for him to route. And that's just that way with, you know, most people trying to break into it. It's much tougher than it was for me.
Nourani: You know, it's an encouragement just to have your voice and to hear your thoughts on that, I'm sure, to artists and to other musicians out there who are a fan of yours and who take your advice and your experience to heart. So thank you for that.
McMurtry: I think the best advice on it I ever heard was Ray Benson from Asleep at the Wheel was asked a similar question. He said, stay out of jail, pay your taxes.
There is one thing. I mean, I've been working with BettySoo a lot lately, and she's Korean American. And there's a lot of things I hadn't thought about. And, you know, I carry a passport just in case I want to leave the country. She carries a passport and a birth certificate everywhere she goes in case ICE wants her to leave. And she doesn't, because I just, they don't really care where you're born. They care what you look like.
And so, you know, I'm a white male American. I haven't had to worry about such things. Turns out there's a lot of Americans that are neither white nor male. You know, different ethnicities, different sexual orientations, people that have had to worry about that kind of thing every minute of every day of their lives. And it's getting worse.
And, you know, 10 years ago we had a lot of rights that we don't have now. We had Roe, we had, you know, the Voting Rights Act was pretty much intact. The Supreme Court hadn't gutted it like they did recently. And so those rights were very hard won. You know, a lot of people went to jail, a lot of people got beat up, a lot of, you know, people died. Martin Luther King died for it. And it took a long time. It didn't take very long for them to take those rights away.
So my basic message is, you know, if we don't want those rights to keep going away, people like me, white males, have to join the rest of the world, throw our weight on the pile, try to do something, try to make a difference. And, you know, I travel around and I don't see that happening very much. You know, we think other people can bail us out. And, you know, Black women are tired of bailing us out. You know, non-white women are tired of bailing out the white male American.
Nourani: Yeah. No, I think that that's incredibly important in this time, and especially whenever I talk about shifting industry, it's also just a shifting world. So yeah, as an artist, it's important to share your thoughts, especially as a songwriter whose voice is such a significant part of their work. So thank you, James.
McMurtry: Well, thank you.
Kellams: Ozarks at Large's Sophia Nourani speaking with singer-songwriter James McMurtry about his work. James and his band, the Martial Law Review, will be headlining the 79th Original Ozark Folk Festival on Saturday, Sept. 5. You can find tickets at OzarkFolk.com.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
