James McMurtry – "Choctaw Bingo" (2002)

You know he had to leave Texas

But he won’t say why

“To the extent that I’m known to the general public at all,” the late Larry McMurtry wrote in 2008, “I’m known as a novelist whose books make excellent movies – Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove.”

McMurtry wrote 32 novels – several were bestsellers, and one won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  But during the years he lived in Washington, DC, the frequency with which he was invited to fancy dinner parties “rose and fell according to the success, not of my books, but of my movies.”

The four movies based on McMurtry novels that the author mentioned above are all excellent.  (Lonesome Dove was actually a TV miniseries, not a movie, but close enough for government work.)

But the books that inspired them were just as good.

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McMurtry’s greatest talent was his ability to create characters that the readers of his books and the viewers of the movies and TV series based on those books cared about.

“I believe the one gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with,” McMurtry once wrote. “My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.”

The characters he created not only made the movies based on his novels great, but also were responsible for those movies being produced in the first place.

“I can write characters that major actors want to play, and that's how movies get made,” McMurtry told an interviewer in 2009.  “People want to play my characters, major actors that you can get money for, from a bank.  You've got to finance it, and nobody's come up with a better way to finance it than the star system.”

The actors who have won or been nominated for Oscars or Emmys for their work in Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove are a remarkable group: Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas, Jeff Bridges, Ben Johnson, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, John Lithgow, Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and Diana Lane.

All told, the three movies in that group were nominated for 26 Academy Awards, winning ten.  Throw in Brokeback Mountain – McMurtry won an Oscar for its screenplay, which was based not on one of his novels but on an Annie Proulx short story – and those numbers climb to 34 and 13.

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As good as those movies were, they don’t match up to the epic four-part miniseries that was made from McMurtry’s most well-known novel, Lonesome Dove, which won the 1986 Pulitzer prize for fiction.  The public and the critics loved it – it attracted huge audiences, and was nominated for an astonishing 18 Emmy nominations.  

“People are always telling me that I had everything to do with [the Lonesome Dove miniseries],” McMurtry told an interviewer in 2009.  ‘The people that had everything to do with it are the producers, the writers, the set designers, all the people that actually worked on it.  I was never on the set.  I turned the key in the ignition. I didn't drive the car.”

McMurtry’s modesty is admirable, but he did quite a bit more than just turn the key in the ignition, as Robert Duvall – who starred in both The Godfather and Lonesome Dove – observed:

I was fortunate enough to be in the biggest thing in American cinema history and American television history, The Godfather, parts one and two, and Lonesome Dove.  Now, The Godfather was better directed, but the novel was only okay; the movies went beyond it.  For Lonesome Dove, we had to do everything we could to come up to the level of the novel.  Whether we really did, I don’t know.

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Larry McMurtry’s only child, James, is an Austin-based singer-songwriter who has released a dozen albums.

Here’s what his father wrote about him in 2008:

[I]t seems to me his best songs are as good as anyone’s best songs.  Indeed, I suspect that the mark he has made artistically is more likely to be indelible than the mark I have made.  Great songs outlast all but the greatest prose.

I’ve just scratched the surface of James McMurtry’s recordings, but it looks like his songs – like his father’s novels – are full of interesting characters.

James McMurtry

That’s certainly the case with today’s featured song, “Choctaw Bingo,” which is about a family reunion at the home of an aging ex-bootlegger from Texas who has moved to Oklahoma, where he cooks crystal meth and plays bingo every Friday night at the local Indian casino. 

Two of the meth-cooker’s nieces are sisters who make the drive from Baxter Springs, Kansas – a town that was only a stone’s throw from the small city I grew up in.  The singer of the song doesn’t hesitate to admit that he has had impure thoughts about them:

Ruth Ann and Lynn, they wear them cut-off britches

And them skinny little halters

And they’re second cousins to me

Man, I don’t care, I want to get between ‘em . . .

Do some sister twisters ’til the cows come home

And we’ll be havin’ us a time

The family get-together takes place in a small town just off U.S. 69 – a highway I used to drive from my hometown (Joplin, Missouri) to Houston when I was a college student there.

Back when I drove U.S. 69, it was mostly a two-lane affair that nonetheless attracted a lot of truck traffic, who moved slowly enough that other drivers were constantly making risky attempts to pass.  As a result, someone printed up a bumper sticker that I saw more than once on others cars that were navigating that road: “Pray For Me – I Drive U.S. 69.”

Click here to listen to “Choctaw Bingo,” which was released in 2002 on McMurtry’s Saint Mary of the Woods album. 

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: