His Songs? Bleak. His Future? Bright.

Might help that McMurtry's father is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist ("Lonesome Dove") and Oscar-winning screenwriter ("Brokeback Mountain"). His mother, Josephine, recently retired as an English literature professor at the University of Richmond. But, James says: "I don't know if it has to do with being around them, or what I listened to when I was growing up."

McMurtry was born in Fort Worth, but his parents split when he was still a toddler. They moved to Virginia -- Josephine to Richmond, Larry to Waterford, in Loudoun County. James lived with his father, who taught at George Mason University and American University before buying an antiquarian bookstore in Georgetown; he spent weekends with his mother.

McMurtry attended his first concert at the age of 7: Johnny Cash at the Richmond Coliseum. He decided he wanted to do what Cash did. His father bought him a guitar; his mother taught him three chords. McMurtry says he really started to think about writing songs when he was given a copy of Kris Kristofferson's debut album, "Me & Bobby McGee." After boarding school in southern Virginia, McMurtry enrolled at the University of Arizona in 1980. He sort of studied English. "I think I became a sophomore after four years. I was more interested in playing the guitar than learning. I kind of regret that now."

He bailed on college and landed back in Texas, working as a house painter and bartender. A few years later, Larry McMurtry was working on a film project with John Mellencamp and passed along a cassette containing some of his son's songs. Impressed, Mellencamp helped McMurtry land a deal with Columbia and produced his 1989 debut.

"I didn't even know it was possible," McMurtry says of a career in music.

Then came the early acclaim, a series of business-side disappointments and, now, the recognition that seems to have been sparked by the scathing "We Can't Make It Here," posted online shortly before the 2004 presidential election. In his influential Entertainment Weekly column, Stephen King called McMurtry's first foray into political songwriting the best American protest song since Bob Dylan's epochal "Masters of War."

King, who owns a rock radio station in Maine, put "We Can't Make It Here" in heavy rotation, right alongside 2002's "Choctaw Bingo," a freewheeling, nine-minute vignette that McMurtry describes as "a song about the North Texas-Southern Oklahoma crystal methamphetamine industry."

"He excites me in a way that very few artists do, both on an emotional level, because I love music, and on an intellectual level, because I love poetry and story," King says from his office in Maine. "The clarity, the details, the feeling that these are real people -- or could be real people -- it's terrific."

King's support, McMurtry says, "couldn't have come at a better time for us; we were kind of slipping off the edge." Now, he's become a star -- albeit in the relatively limited world of Americana music. He's one of the three most requested artists on XM Radio's X Country channel. "James is really fine-tuning his craft, and I think his lyric writing is becoming even more evocative," says X Country program director Jessie Scott. "It was great early on, but it was more like shorthand. It's much more fleshed out now, especially his characters."

Larry McMurtry has watched and listened with pride. He has immersed himself in his son's music and has come to a surprising conclusion: "James's best songs are so good that I don't think that my best novels really come up to them."

How's that again?

"One element of music is poetry, and poetry is a lot harder than fiction," the father says from Arizona. "A lyric is the hardest form. You have to concentrate and squeeze those words. I respect James a lot for having found his own art and done it so well."