One of the best singer song writers ever.

"Rachel's Song" is THE perfect song by a truly genius song poet. Spare, direct, observant, getting across true realities about human 'suffering' in its literal meaning of carrying underneath life's problems the heavy weight of life's burdens. Four stanzas give us Rachel's story with a powerful economy that is like William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, Larry McMurtry, Russell Banks. The young boy is at its essential core but has no voice. Rachel and the absent father create for him what the parents in Truffaut's " "Four Hundred Blows" create for Antoine Daniel. Anyone who has any childhood feeling left, can feel what is in the boy's heart and stomach and developing mind as rachel 'sings' her own defiant song. The song begins with an eastbound snow-dusted Chesapeake and Ohio coal train and shadows pulling the curtain of the night down along the mountain slopes and ends with those ephemeral snowflakes dancing each one briefly in the light outside the window. McMurtry's genius gives us the snowflakes peeking in at this mother and child family unit briefly hovering and falling on past. For the boy this naturally beautiful image is what? Like much great literature, McMurtry opens us up to feeling for the mother and the boy. And the song leaves us there forever after. I am grateful that he played it at the Bugle Boy in LaGrange two nights ago (October 27). It was the first time I have ever heard McMurtry play when he was not in 'liquor sales' as he puts it. That is, without people chattering, bottles and glasses clinging and clunking.His guitar work just gets better and better and his ability to "get the song across," as Bob Dylan puts it, and "not himself" is now refined to perfection, too. To hear McMurty perform is one of life's great blessings.

Love James tone on the 12 string.

What an honest gem. Wish he would be more productive, without loosing momentum/content. Please stay around! Hope you will visit The Netherlands again soon!