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“Hoo Boy. That’s for me!”

Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002)

The first stop after The Easy Riders on this personal journey is to mention that “Gambler’s Blues” is part of my personal playing repertoire. This song is an easy blues to play, and a rewarding blues to sing. It covers some of the emotional territory of a full-on murder ballad, without alarming the neighbors too much with brutal, bloody confessions. When finding myself in a foul mood, I usually discover that “Gambler’s Blues” does some good mucking out. Even though I’ve found some performances of the song I quite like, nothing about listening to the song measures up to the value and power of singing it.

I was not alone in discovering this song as a kid, and resonating with the scenes in its verses. In the liner notes to his Folkways Years, 1959-1961 recording, Dave Van Ronk describes his discovery of the song:

“As Jelly Roll Morton said: ‘This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life.’ Although it isn’t exactly a blues and I didn’t exactly hear it. I read it. When I was a thirteen year old, give or take, and the second hottest ukelele basher in the nabe (Tommy McNiff could cut me anytime). I ran across a copy of a book called The Fireside Book of Folksongs. Along with ‘Abdullah Bulbul Emir’ and ‘Barbara Allen,’ there was a song called ‘Saint James Infirmary.’ Now, I couldn’t read music, but I took one look at those lyrics and said, ‘Hoo Boy, that’s for me.'” 

Van Ronk made “Gambler’s Blues”/”St. James Infirmary” a regular part of his repertoire. It stayed a song that was “for him” from ages 13 to 65. I saw him play it late in his career at the Old Town School of Folk Music, which was quite likely the first time I saw the song performed live. (You can listen to that full performance here. Special thanks to Colby Maddox at the Resource Center of the Old Town School for making this track available for this post.) There’s not much to match the ferocity of his delivery of the song on Folkways’ Down in Washington Square recording. Gravelly, grouchy, and grizzled, Van Ronk pours both rage and bravado into this performance. It’s also included in the playlist at the end of this post. Here is a live performance of Van Ronk from 1997 from Smithsonian Folkways.

“Search this wide world over”

Sandburg’s Songbag provides A and B variants to the lyrics. The first one keeps the framing device of the song’s story being told from the perspective of somebody who witnesses or hears Big Joe’s account. The B version is in the first person. Listening through the various examples, strains and families emerge, and you can hear certain influences – hearing Dock Boggs come through in the more languid tones of The Mutineers, or Jimmie Rodgers holding sway with Bill Monroe, Jorma Kaukonen, Don Rigsby and others. Louis Armstrong’s influence can certainly not be discounted.

From the lyrical perspective, singers might tweak the story in one way or another, bringing greater coherence to it. These moves are too various to sum up neatly. I’m tempted to argue that “Gambler’s Blues,” like with what Shaleane noted in “In the Pines,” we have a song that is a collection of semi-connected vignettes that we assemble into coherence.

Jazz and blues versions of the song often invoke the musical allusions to New Orleans funeral processions, at least the slow parts. You can hear hints of those processions in Louis Armstrong’s performance of the song from 1928, for example.

Josh White stitches the song’s scenes together in this clean and clear acoustic blues version. White would later make use of the “I went down to the St. James Infirmary” line as the start to his “Free and Equal Blues” (on YouTube), a clever “protest blues,” if you will, involving blood plasma as a great equalizer.

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