Michael Martin Murphey closed out a successful decade of recording with the album "Land of Enchantment", which contained "Never Givin' Up on Love", "Got to Pay the Fiddler", "Route 66", and "Land of Enchantment", which became New Mexico's state ballad. Despite the impressive critical and commercial success he achieved throughout the 1980s, Michael Martin Murphey's creative heart and spirit began to focus on the Western music that first captured his imagination as a boy growing up in Texas. As early as 1985, Murphey performed with the New Mexico Symphony in a show called "A Night in the American West", which led to many
The Land Is Bright out of sheer incredulity)... it is impossible not to realize that as dramatic literature "The Land Is Bright" is something to be taken about as seriously as a comic strip serial, which it closely resembles". Eleanor Roosevelt was more enthusiastic, particularly of the message: "leaves you no moment when you are not tensely held by the action on the stage... There were times when... the story was slightly overdrawn, and yet... I came away with one great sense of satisfaction, for... It points the moral that the whole level of public responsibility and integrity has gone up over the period