Forgotten Music: Michael Murphy and Steve Fromholz

I've never been a big concert-goer. Back in the Seventies, though, when I was going to college in Denton, I went to a few shows on campus since they were free. I saw Willie Nelson a couple of times that way. But the best concert I attended there featured Michael Murphey and Steve Fromholz, who at the time were part of the so-called "outlaw country" movement of singer/songwriters in Texas. Murphey is better known now as Michael Martin Murphey and does a lot of traditional Western music (much different from "country and western" music, which is often really neither of those things). Fromholz, who was also part of a duo known as Frummox with Dan McCrimmon, never became well-known, although he appeared as an actor in at least one movie starring Willie Nelson. He was also the official Poet Laureate of Texas at one time. I have no idea what he's doing now.

He and Michael Murphey were both great at that concert, and I had a fine time. "Texas Trilogy" is probably Fromholz's best song, although I'm also fond of a humorous tune called "Rest Area Waltz". My friend Leland DeBusk was at that concert with me and became a big Fromholz fan, even learning to play "Texas Trilogy" on the guitar. And Murphy's "Cosmic Cowboy" really sums up the era. Leland could play that one, too. He's gone now, bless his heart, but the music's still here and makes me think of him. "Ridin' the range and actin' strange . . ." Good stuff from 'way back when.