When James McMurty recently introduced his song “Levelland” (“one of the Robert Earl Keen songs I wrote”) at The Birchmere, he explained that he’d taken some poetic license in the titular setting. (Levelland is a small town in a Texas west of Lubbock.) The song was inspired by Max Crawford, a novelist who lived in another small West Texas town, Floydada. He joked that Crawford is the best novelist to ever come from Floydada, and likely the only one.

Max, he said, shot himself in the foot by “trying to be a true artist, which is always a mistake.” He wanted to title his first novel The Penis of Jesus, and the publisher wouldn’t issue it as such; later it came out as Backslider, which James praised as excellent novel. He would know: his late father was Larry McMurtry, one of the most celebrated writers of the last 60 years.