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.
“As we develop cities and urban sprawl, we run off animals that cannot be replaced by technology,” he continued. “You can't eat computer chips."
Best known for a genre busting career that includes topping the Pop, Country, Bluegrass and Western Music charts, the timing of High Stakes is particularly significant as the album release day falls on Earth Day (April 22). “It may sound like an oxymoron, but ‘Cowboy Culture’ is real and relevant,” Murphey says. “I celebrate men and women who love Dirt, Grass and Water.