By The Landlord
“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
"Men are like a deck of cards. You'll find the occasional king, but most are jacks." – Laura Swenson
“All magicians have 52 friends.” – Amit Kalantri
“Cribbage, n. A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas.” – Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“When dealing with relationships in life you can not play your queen of hearts like a three of clubs.” – Angel Moreira
"I stayed up one night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died." – Steven Wright
They’re designed for games and magic tricks, and likely date back to the Tang dynasty’s woodblock printing in the 9th century before evolving through Persia, Egypt, and later Europe. But they also play out, through an international language, something beyond a game. Not just of winning and losing, but of chance, planning, memory, skill, survival, bluff, cunning, cheating, playing straight, risk, daring, a grander meaning and metaphor of how all our fates can rise and fall, but how some can the very best, or worst, of what life deals you.
A deck of cards feels strangely antiquarian in the digital age, but its system of numbers, suits and faces have been part of many cultures for hundreds of years, and represent in part a microcosm of society , a group changing hands, where roles can suddenly switch in context, a virtual class system of the higher and lower, but, when the lower orders suddenly come together in particular sequence, in a flush or a run or group, either by chance or design, they can overpower the conventionally higher decorated king, queen or jack. Destiny’s wheel turning with a finger’s flip.
The Card Players - Theodoor Rombouts (1597–1637)
No wonder then that with all the language and the metaphor around playing cards and tarot, they have inspired so much within the framework of song in phrase and storyline, from queen of hearts or diamonds, to ace of spades, jack of hearts down to the two of hearts, and of course, the joker.
So what’s on deck this week? Any songs that mention primarily or in passing, literally or metaphorically, words or scenarios associated with playing cards, and ideally in reference to the particular cards themselves. And any context in which people find them, high stakes games to just passing time, whether that be with those of the conventional hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades, international equivalents, or that of the various forms of Tarot and their associated figures and scenes.
Tarot
The most common type of playing card is the French-suited, standard 52-card pack, out of which comes the English pattern design, but there’s also Belgian-Genoese as well as German, Italian, Spanish and Swiss suits, which all centre upon the royalty model.
International varieties
Cards come up in all kinds of contexts, including that of music. I’ve even got a set of playing cards with guitar chord patterns on them, and have tried to use them, in a Bowie /Brian Eno Oblique Strategies-style to try to write music by turning each over at random. The results aren’t always successful but can be oddly interesting.
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies - a different form of playing with cards
As a kid the first game of cards I’d play was Top Trumps - taking in such subjects as dinosaurs, cars, and aeroplanes. These days you can get TT equivalents on pretty much anything including pop stars, and as with conventional cards, while you can’t predict what you’ll get, but can make the best of them by remembering all relative strengths and weaknesses within the pack. It’s a cliche, but with all games, knowing when to reveal and timing is everything.
Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players (1894/5)
Another card game I recall from childhood is Happy Families. Did anyone else play this? I always found them quite disturbing, not merely because the very name seemed heavily ironic, but also because the original illustrations had a particularly scary, cruel, violent look, akin to original nursery rhymes.
Jaques Happy Families. A bit terrifying?
More conventional 52-pack card games come in various forms, from trick-taking (bridge, whist, spades) to matching (mahjong, Go Fish, Old Maid), shedding games where players need to get rid of their cards, solitary sequence games (Solitaire and Patience), gambling and banking (Pontoon), strength comparison games ((Poker), all playing with the variables of chance alongside the judgement of relative knowledge. In song, it’s those pivotal moments where a character or narrator loses or gains everything that create such a good hook for a story.
Dead Man’s Hand, for example? The card hand purportedly held by Wild Bill Hickok at the time of his death when shot during a gambling game - black aces and eights.
The nicknames for cards might also offer a rich source of lyrical inspiration, not merely the face or court cards, the wild cards or numerals, but also the lesser known ones, from deuces for twos, the treys for the threes, sailboats for fours, or snowmen for eights. The king is also known as the cowboy, K-boy, the one-eye, the man with the axe and much more. The queen of spades variously the black lady, or Black Maria, and the queen of diamond is Sweet Caroline. The Jack is is also Boy, Bower, Jackson, Hook, J-Bird, with many other variants for different suits, such as the diamond Laughing Boy, Blackjack or Jackass.
And of course there’s so many for the Ace and various outcomes associated with it – Blackberry, Death Card, Bull, Bullet, Puppy Foot (clubs), or Tax Card (spades). The joker of course has many substitutes too, such as Best Bower, The Bird, The Fly, The Fool, Old Maid, and Pagliacci.
And of the numbers there’s also many oddball but evocative names, such as the ten dimes, the nine of diamonds being the Curse of Scotland, the eights Fat Lady or Race Track, the seven of diamonds Beer Card, the six Candy Cane, Boot, Sax or Grace Card, the five as Fever, the four as The Devil’s Bedpost, the three as Crab, the two as Dewey or Duck, and many many more …
Paul Newman in The Sting (1973). “If you look around the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.”
So what tricks or games do you have up your record sleeves? It’s time to shuffle the pack and see what hand is dealt. And the guest dealer in chief this week is none other than the brilliant George Boyland, who will oversee this week’s game with skilful scrutiny Place your playing-card related songs in comments below in time for deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday, for playlist published next week. All hands on deck, but try to keep them out of the water …
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