For over 30 years, acclaimed singer-songwriter Michael Martin Murphey has been celebrating the Christmas season “Cowboy-style.” A pioneer of Americana music with a resume that includes hits that have topped the Pop, Country, Bluegrass, and Western music charts, the genre-busting Murphey has announced plans to continue celebrating with his multi-city Michael Martin Murphey’s Cowboy Christmas tour for the 31st straight year. Once again, Murphey makes a stop at the St. Francis Auditorium, in the New Mexico Museum of Art, on Sunday, December 8, 2024, at 7:30 p.m.
A Cowboy on a Mission
It seems Murphey, a New Mexico favorite, never tires of spreading the Christmas cheer, through Michael Martin Murphey’s Cowboy Christmas. “What I try to do is encourage people to think of the spirit of giving, charity, and forgiving, which is the spirit of Christmas,” he says. “It’s about delivering that beautiful message of Christmas to people.”
Michael Martin Murphey’s Cowboy Christmas was inspired by an event that began in 1885 in Anson, Texas, when the local community of cowboys came together to celebrate the season with the very first Cowboy Christmas Ball. The festivities included dancing and merriment that has continued virtually every year since.
“The first time I came to the annual Cowboy Christmas Ball in Anson, I was floored that the community had worked so hard to keep it going,” says Murphey, himself a rancher and farmer. “I fell in love watching the older couples dance and the dances being passed on to the younger people. It re-connected me to the tradition. The Cowboy Christmas Ball is steeped in everything I hold dear of growing up in Texas at Christmas. All the dances were here — the waltzes, the mazurkas, the Paul Jones, the Virginia Reel. The women make their own costumes and clothes, and the men still wear string ties and frock coats. It’s a family reunion of friends.”
Murphey combines music from his Wildfire! Greatest Hits album and multiple best-selling Christmas albums into a colorful holiday celebration multi-media production. Included in Michael Martin Murphey’s Cowboy Christmas, and accompanied with Murphey’s “Rio Grande Band,” are dramatic lighting, a Western dance troupe, Western Art, master-artist photographs, spectacular videos and humorous cowboy poetry.
Michael Martin Murphey’s Cowboy Christmas brings out the rural nature of the story of the Birth of Jesus in the country village of Bethlehem, where the Good News comes first to livestock people in the fields to the herders, or “cowboys,” of 2000 years ago.
“That underscores that Jesus came for all people, all races and all classes,” he continues. “That means that rural people should feel a significant part of the Christmas message because they were chosen to hear the story first. This is my favorite season of the year. We remember our fathers and mothers. We celebrate our children, and we treasure our friends and the many blessings given by our Lord. It really brings out the very best in all of us.”
About Michael Martin Murphey
Michael Martin Murphey is an American singer-songwriter best known for writing and performing Western music, country music and popular music. A multiple Grammy nominee, Murphey has six gold albums, including Cowboy Songs, the first album of cowboy music to achieve gold status since Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs by Marty Robbins in 1959.
Best known for such hits as Wildfire, Carolina In The Pines, Geronimo’s Cadillac, What’s Forever For, Long Line of Love, Cowboy Logic, and more, Murphey has had a long and storied career, which shows no signs of slowing down. In April 2022, he was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the prestigious Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City, Okla. A month earlier he was inducted into the Texas Songwriter Hall of Fame.
Sponsored by Gardenia Jungle Entertainment, Red Zia Events, Hutton Broadcasting, and the Santa Fe New Mexican, Michael Martin Murphey’s Cowboy Christmas tickets are now on sale. Visit the website for more information or to purchase tickets.
