Americana singer-songwriter McMurtry returns to Tucson for Congress show

After streaming performances from home in Austin, Texas, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Texas singer-songwriter James McMurtry is getting back on stage with live audiences.

But he has a few unbendable ground rules to keep himself and his audience safe: He wants everyone, especially at indoor venues, to either show proof of being vaccinated or that they have tested negative for the COVID-19 virus within 72 hours of the show, and everyone must wear a mask.

The rules have cost him a show at Phoenix’s Musical Instrument Museum, where he was scheduled to play before his show at Hotel Congress’s Club Congress Plaza on Sunday, Sept. 5. No worries, he was quick to say, as the Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix picked up the Sept. 3 date.

But McMurtry also has had to call off a handful of dates on the East Coast and Midwest, where the pandemic is spiking and local and state governments have refused to enforce any safety protocols.

Sunday’s show, presented by Rhythm & Roots, will be McMurtry’s first in Tucson since he played Club Congress in summer 2019. For the award-winning Americana artist, playing Tucson is always like coming home in a way.

McMurtry, 59, attended the University of Arizona in the 1980s and spent time here over the years visiting his father, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, who split his time between his small Texas hometown of Archer City and Tucson. Larry McMurtry died in Tucson in March at the age of 84.

The younger McMurtry stayed at the UA just two years before deciding that college wasn’t for him. Instead, he struck out at Tucson’s local clubs playing gigs, most of them without pay, he recalled.

His first paying gig was in Benson at the Riverside Inn Saloon along the San Pedro River. McMurtry was recruited to play guitar for a group of fiddlers affiliated with the Southern Arizona Old Time Fiddlers Association. The leader of the group was named Jack and he lived in neighboring St. David.

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“None of us were all that good except Jack, but it was fun,” recalled McMurtry, who said he was paid $50 for the gig.

McMurtry comes here with his first new studio album in almost seven years. “The Horses and the Hounds,” released Aug. 20, was all but finished in late 2019 when he had to return to Jackson Browne’s Groovemaster’s studio to record vocals — he had attempted it in June 2019, but the wood smoke from the area’s wildfires shredded his voice, he said — and to lay down the piano tracks.

The vocals were wrapped up and they were about to record the piano when California shut down due to the pandemic. McMurtry ended up tapping studio musicians in Texas to finish the recording.

The album has received commendable reviews for McMurtry’s signature storytelling that “can make a 5-minute song unfold like a novel, where you feel like you know the protagonist first hand, and have just experienced an hours-long epic,” opined savingcountrymusic.com.

McMurtry plugs back in for the album, which follows his 2015 acoustic CD “Complicated Game.” Pop Matters magazine said the addition of amplified instruments “adds the grit and punch that has powered some of his best work over the years, from ‘Where’d You Hide the Body’ to ‘It Had to Happen,’ ‘Saint Mary of the Woods’ and beyond.”

“It’s the elasticity of McMurtry’s electric rhythm playing that has placed him ahead of most other singer-songwriters in his class,” Pop Matters wrote. “He’s able to groove and rock out while he delivers tales poetic in structure and cinematic in scope.”

McMurtry is coming to Tucson solo, just him and his guitar.