I was seventeen the first time I heard “Geronimo’s Cadillac” by Michael Martin Murphey. It was the summer of 1972, and I was sitting in the back room of a smoky bar in Helmond, fiddling nervously with an untuned six-string and waiting for my turn on stage. My friend Jan, ever the American-in-music enthusiast, slammed a battered cassette on the table and said in his thick Brabants accent, “Luuster, Kroes—dit moet je horen!” You gotta hear this.
At the time, the Netherlands was awash in disco and the last gasps of beat music. But for cowboys in spirit—boys like me who dreamed of the open prairie from behind the gray sprawl of North Brabant—country music was oxygen. We had Merle, Dolly, some Johnny, sure. Yet what Jan played me that day wasn’t anything like those legends. It was something altogether quieter, worn with the dust of real memory and longing: it was Murphey’s song.
“Geronimo’s Cadillac” never made the rounds like “Rhinestone Cowboy” or “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” It charted, yes, for a time on the US country lists, but in Holland it was as rare as a tumbleweed on the Marktplein. Perhaps that’s what made it so poignant for me—how it felt like mine, a secret told in a language I was still learning how to sing.
The song opens with a gentle, rolling guitar that sounds, even now, like the hush of wind through prairie grass. Then Murphey’s voice, clear and haunted, intones:
*They put Geronimo in jail down south
Where he couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth
Sergeant, Sergeant, don’t you feel
There’s something wrong