Other lines in the song also suggest uncontrollable forces (the ghost woman rides the pony with a “whirlwind by her side”). Indeed, wildfires are a destructive phenomenon of nature. Here’s the rub: Murphy would give a rational and sanitized explanation for matters that are anything but. The narrator embraces freedom by leaving the world of the living to journey into the underworld, in other words, by self-extinction, suicide. She’s coming for me, I know And on Wildfire we’re both gonna go… On Wildfire we’re gonna ride Gonna leave sodbustin’ behind Get these hard times right on out of our minds Riding Wildfire In the final verses of the song, the narrator joyously prepares to ride off with the ghost woman on the magical (ghost) pony: However, the disturbing thing here is that the desire for escape takes the form of death. In the 2016 interview, Murphy has this to say about what that was like for him: “When I lived in California in the late ’60s, a lot of my friends were into the culture of the day-drugs and free sex-and I felt out of place there.” I would go so far as to say that these were the “hard times” that Murphy wanted to escape when the song emerged from his “subconscious. ![]() Murphy lived up in the mountains outside L.A., but had to drive into the city each day to work on material for a Kenny Rogers album. To start, I would argue that the lyrics are personal inasmuch that when Murphy wrote them he was going through a difficult period where he had to work long hours each day in an environment that he found morally repulsive, the Los Angeles music scene. Murphy’s pontifications about folklore and liturgy may be heartfelt, but they strike me as disingenuous, as talking points designed to curtail any deeper digging. Lewis used animals in The Chronicles of Narnia.” In the ghost story, the horse is a symbol of the Savior, in the same way C.S. I came to be a Christian when I was five or six years old, and I was a cowboy kid with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, so when the preacher told me that Jesus would come back for me on a white horse, I was all wrapped up in that. “I also think a lot of it is wrapped up in my Christian upbringing: In the Biblical book of Revelations, it talks about Jesus coming back on a white horse. The song is about “getting above the hard times.” Even more, Murphy, a devout Christian, sees the song as expressing the beliefs of his faith. In the same interview, Murphy presents a pointed interpretation of the lyrics. Frank Dobie identified this ghost horse story as the most prominent one in the lore of the Southwest.” In a 2016 interview, Murphy starts out by saying that the “song came from deep down in my subconscious,” only to go on and cite a specific origin for the lyrics: “My grandfather told me a story when I was a little boy about a legendary ghost horse that the Indians talked about. ![]() During interviews, he would concede that he didn’t know what the lyrics were about in time, however, as the years went on, he began to offer several deliberate ideas. ![]() The long and short, the lyrics came to him in a dream. On stage, Murphy often introduced the song with a few succinct sentences about its unusual origin. I was twelve years old in 1975 when I first heard the beautiful and haunting Michael Murphy song “Wild Fire,” which is about a ghost woman who rides on the magical pony that the song is named after.
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