Michael Martin Murphey

Over the past 40 years, Murphey has left an indelible mark on the American Music Landscape with hits like "Geronimo's Cadillac,” "Cosmic Cowboy,” “Wildfire,” “Carolina In The Pines,” “Cherokee Fiddle,” “What’s Forever For,” and "Cowboy Logic."

On his new album, High Stakes: Cowboy Songs VII, Iconic Western Artist Michael Martin Murphey pleads on the stunningly beautiful Australian cowboy song, “Campfire On The Road” “We must never let ’em take this life away / Old stock routes belong to one and all / Drovers, dreamers all agree / Poets, Aborigines / We have a right to light a campfire on the road.”

The lyric underscores the dramatic tone of Murphey’s return to his Texas-cowboy roots at a time when we are facing the rapid deterioration of our crowded world's most precious resources: Land and Water.

"This generation of the human family is witnessing the emergence of their home as a desert planet", says Murphey, a passionate lifelong rancher-poet. "Two-thirds of the Earth's land surface is grassland plain. Eighty percent of its soil is dying. This is due to a lack of grazing animals - cattle, sheep, buffalo, deer, elk, goats, even free-range chickens and pigs. We need vastly more split-hooved grazing animals that turn up the soil - managed by the world's stockmen and stockwomen - to replicate the rotational-grazing habits of wild herds to restore grasslands for the creatures and life-forms that thrive there.

Sponsored by Jackson National Life
Presented by Franklin Theatre Live