Those Gambler Blues B
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 08/08/2020

Day 145 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "This may be what polite society calls a gutter song. In a foreign language, in any lingo but that of the U. S. A., it would seem less vulgar, more bizarre. Its opening realism works on toward irony and fantasy, dropping in its final lines again to blunt realism. Text and melody are from Jake Zeitlin and Jack Hagerty of Fort Worth and Los Angeles."

Many early jazz & popular recordings attribute authorship (of the popular version) to "Joe Primrose," a pseudonym for Irving Mills. His copyright, though, seems to have been registered in 1929, or after Armstrong's influential recording. Presumably he was registering ownership rather than authorship. (PJS in the Traditional Ballad Index).