James McMurtry and son Curtis tell tales at Sellersville Theater

Storytelling is the McMurtry family business.

Each generation, however, goes about it in its own particular way. The combo of veteran Austin, Texas, hard-bitten guitarist James and his son Curtis McMurtry — who will appear together at the Sellersville Theater on Friday, with the elder headlining — tell tales in song, with divergent musical approaches.

And father and son are both heirs to a McMurtry oral tradition that James' father, Larry, — author of The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove — applied to a prolific career as novelist and screenwriter.

So is there a McMurtry writing gene, a DNA disposition to putting words to paper, or collecting them on a smartphone Notes app, as James often did working on his masterfully crafted 2015 album, Complicated Game?

"I actively rebel against that idea," says Curtis, 25, who released his first solo album, Respectable Enemy, in 2014. He names Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Towns Van Zandt as his principal influences and Fiona Apple and Chris Thile (of Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers) as favorite contemporary artists.

"It's totally not genetic," says the guitarist and banjo player who studied music composition at Sarah Lawrence College. Escaping shadows is not something he's had to work at, he says, talking on the phone from Austin before heading out on tour. "My dad grew up mostly in Virginia" — where Larry McMurtry taught, and owned a used bookstore in Washington — "and my grandfather lived in Archer City, Texas. That's pretty different than growing up in Austin in the 1990s."

James McMurtry, 53, says he was never tempted to emulate his father, who is 79. "I wanted to be Johnny Cash from the minute I heard his voice," he says in a separate conversation, also from Austin. "I always knew I was headed for music."

McMurtry first heard Cash "when I was three or four" and a few years later went with his mother and stepdad to see the country superstar at the Richmond Coliseum. That along with a gig shortly thereafter where he saw Kris Kristofferson sealed his fate. "What I was struck by was how everybody in the band was really having a great time. That kind of cemented for me what I really wanted to do."

His steadfastness is attested to by his son, who jokes that all his father ever seems to listen to is "John Prine, John Hartford, Johnny Cash - anybody named John."  

Curtis is more likely to mention Stravinsky, Shostakovich or Louis Armstrong, and his pet peeve is that the umbrella term "Americana" is synonymous with "alt-country," not taking in the multifarious strands of music in a melting pot nation.

Complicated Game is James McMurtry's first studio album since 2008. "I didn't make a new record because our club draw held up pretty good," he says. "All our money comes off the road. We used to tour to promote record sales, but now it's the other way around."

Almost continually since 2002, when in Austin, McMurtry has played solo Tuesday at the Continental Club and Wednesdays with a full band.

Business has been good, thanks largely to "We Can't Make It Here." The song from 2005's Childish Things expresses rage at the downsizing of the American dream. Support of fans like Stephen King — who called McMurtry "the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation" and put the song in rotation on the radio station he owns in Bangor, Maine — meant selling out multiple nights in economically distressed markets. Critic Robert Christgau named "We Can't Make It Here" the best song of the '00s.

"If I write a song to get a point across, I'm likely to write a sermon, not a song," he says. "I got lucky with "We Can't Make It Here." It was was a character, but it was a character that agreed with me."

McMurtry's method, with songs like Complicated Game's "Copper Canteen," which begins: "Honey, don't you be yelling at me when I'm cleaning my gun / I'll wash the blood off the tailgate when deer season's done" is to "start with two lines and a melody, and then think, 'Who said that?' From that, I can get the story."

Curtis McMurtry says that on Respectable Enemy, he tried to write in the voice of characters "who are villains that think they're victims." That unreliable narrator approach takes a page out of Randy Newman's songwriting book. But though he doesn't aspire to write like his father, he admires his craft.

"That ability to put a novel in the shape of a song: It's amazing," McMurtry says. "No one does it as well as he does. There's a song called "Carlisle's Haul" on Complicated Game about an illegal fishing operator like that. He gives you every single detail."

His grandfather, who has published 49 books, "writes the way he talks. It's so conversational." But it's Larry McMurtry's work ethic he emulates. "He still writes every day," he says of the Pulitizer Prize winner. "When I would spend time at his house as a kid, I'd wake up to typewriter keys tapping."

James McMurtry identifies himself as "a short-form writer, a verse writer, which Larry always says is just a different muscle."

Still, his father comes through.

"I don't know if it was his writing or his talking. He spent his first years on a ranch, and they lived basically a 19th-century existence. They went everywhere on horseback, and their chief entertainment was conversation."

McMurtry's son, he says, "knows intervals and chords I never thought of. It's very challenging for me to learn his songs. I have to shape my left hand into contortions I've never seen."

James is also absorbing a lesson from Curtis that he never did from Larry. "He's more disciplined than I am," he says of his opening act. "So I guess that's something else I'm learning from him. I'm getting older, so I don't have time to [mess] around anymore."

James McMurtry with Curtis McMurtry, 8 p.m. Friday. at Sellersville Theater, 23 W. Temple Ave., Sellersville. Sold out. 215-257-5808, st94.com.

ddeluca@phillynews.com 215-854-5628 @delucadan www.philly.com/inthemix