“Choctaw Bingo” by James McMurtry

"Choctaw Bingo" rolls out of Saint Mary of the Woods, the album James McMurtry released on Sugar Hill in 2002, and it's a Southern rock yarn about a family reunion in Oklahoma that doubles as a report on how badly the heartland's economy had come unglued. McMurtry wrote it from what he saw on the drives back and forth across Oklahoma to gigs in other places, and hung it on a Chuck Berry chassis: the tune sits close to Berry's 1956 "You Can't Catch Me".

It has had a long, strange afterlife. Stephen King picked it as one of his desert island songs on Desert Island Discs in 2006, it landed on the soundtrack of Beer for My Horses, and in 2009 Ron Rosenbaum argued in Slate that it spoke for post-crash America better than "The Star-Spangled Banner" and should be the new national anthem.

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