Writing my runes by the dark of the moon

Oak Cliff's Michael Martin Murphey is best known for his mellow country-rock (Wildfire, Carolina in the Pines), and for being one of the early headliners at the Armadillo World Headquarters in the Austin Music movement.  More recently, he has led the preservation and promotion of authentic cowboy music.

The songs that follow are from his Lone Wolf LP, circa 1978.  To the best of my knowledge, he doesn't play any of the songs from that album in his shows these days, which is a shame, because his themes and lyrics on some of the songs on that album are on a par with Henley's opus The Last Resort, with a bit of introspection not readily apparent in the latter's works until 1989's The End of the Innocence. Disclosure: I suppose I am a wee bit biased in favor of both of these artists, inasmuch as I matriculated from the same university that both had attended in the 1960s.

At any rate, I did see these songs performed live in February or March of 1978, when Mr. Murphey opened at DCC for America.  My GF and I were running just a tad late, and I can vividly remember entering the concourse of the venue to the opening strains of Carolina in the Pines starting the show. Even though Gerry, Dewey, and Dan were the headliners that night, it was MMM's Lone Wolf that I bought at a small record shop in Six Flags Mall shortly after.





Trivia Note: I didn't really think of it until just now, but I attended both artists' septuagenarian birthday shows: Murphey's 71st at The Kessler in 2016, and Henley's 70th at the AAC this past July.