Murphy’s latest album of fresh original material, the bracing 10-song live solo set Hard Bargain, finds him back in the sweet spot between J.J. Cale and John Cale, Vassar Clements and Chris Whitley, conjuring the Irish rebellion of 1798 to a jugular jig in “The Caves of Killala”; chasing the spirit of Charlie Patton on the plaintive “Trust”; investigating the intrigue of a 19th-century murder ballad on “Holcombe Creek,”; and shuffling in the groove between Springsteen and Chuck Berry on the jump-blues “Last Bridge.” Is it possible to suggest the avant-surf echoes of Tom Verlaine’s Television can coexist with a violinist’s take on White Stripes-style garage-blues? In Murphy’s world, it certainly can. Recorded on a rainy night at a small theater in Boise, Idaho, with just Murphy’s insistent foot stomp and tales of gun-running, insurrection and doomed miners to accompany his fiddle, you’d be forgiven for thinking that time had stopped; the violin, especially in able hands that suggest gypsy divination, has always had a preternatural way of fusing the past with the present. But with Murphy’s own post- modern approach to those antique rhythms and the storytelling instinct that drives these rustic tales, the effect may be as much to foretell the future as to celebrate the past. —James Rotondi, March 2017, Nashville, TN