Amazon.com The biggest hit of Michael Martin Murphey's career was his 1975 No. 3 single, "Wildfire," a musical fable about a pony who roamed the Nebraska plains after his owner died. With a cheap romanticism borrowed from Jonathan Livingston Seagull and an acoustic-pop arrangement borrowed from a hundred fellow James Taylor imitators, the song epitomized the sensitive soft-rock of the mid-'70s. The number has been re-recorded for Murphey's 1997 album, The Horse Legends, a collection of 10 songs about horses. Most of the other tracks reflect the same facile myth-making and easy-listening/folk that made Murphey a star more than two decades ago. The singer wrote or cowrote six of the numbers, including tributes to a thoroughbred race horse ("The Running Blood"), a wild horse ("Running Shadow"), a palomino pony ("Palomino Days"), and a quarter horse ("Quarter Horse Rider"). He pays tribute to his fellow mid-'70s guitar strummers by singing Dan Fogelberg's "Run for the Roses" and Gordon Lightfoot's "The Pony Man," but somehow he managed to avoid doing Roger McGuinn's "Chestnut Mare." Little evidence of how ornery and contrary horses can be survives the golden gauze that seems to hang over these songs. The only number that seems firmly connected to the ground, in fact, is the duet between Murphey and Johnny Cash on the great Jimmie Driftwood song, "Tennessee Stud." --Geoffrey Himes, ISBN13: B000002NFG ISBN10: B000002NFG Material Type: audioCDAmazon.com The biggest hit of Michael Martin Murphey's career was his 1975 No. 3 single, "Wildfire," a musical fable about a pony who roamed the Nebraska plains after his owner died. With a cheap romanticism borrowed from Jonathan Livingston Seagull and an acoustic-pop arrangement borrowed from a hundred fellow James Taylor imitators, the song epitomized the sensitive soft-rock of the mid-'70s. The number has been re-recorded for Murphey's 1997 album, The Horse Legends, a collection of 10 songs about horses. Most of the other tracks reflect the same facile myth-making and easy-listening/folk that made Murphey a star more than two decades ago. The singer wrote or cowrote six of the numbers, including tributes to a thoroughbred race horse ("The Running Blood"), a wild horse ("Running Shadow"), a palomino pony ("Palomino Days"), and a quarter horse ("Quarter Horse Rider"). He pays tribute to his fellow mid-'70s guitar strummers by singing Dan Fogelberg's "Run for the Roses" and Gordon Lightfoot's "The Pony Man," but somehow he managed to avoid doing Roger McGuinn's "Chestnut Mare." Little evidence of how ornery and contrary horses can be survives the golden gauze that seems to hang over these songs. The only number that seems firmly connected to the ground, in fact, is the duet between Murphey and Johnny Cash on the great Jimmie Driftwood song, "Tennessee Stud." --Geoffrey Himes, ISBN13: B000002NFG ISBN10: B000002NFG Material Type: audioCD , ISBN13: B000002NFG ISBN10: B000002NFG Material Type: audioCD