The Gambler

"The Gambler" was written by the Nashville songwriter Don Schlitz. With the classic chorus lines, "You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em," the song is told from the first-person perspective about a conversation with an old poker player on a train. The card shark gives life advice to the narrator in the form of poker metaphors, before presumably dying in his sleep. According to the Reader's Digest Country and Western Songbook, Schlitz wrote the tune in honor of his late father, "the best man I ever knew." "He wasn't a gambler," he explained. "But the song was my way of dealing with the relationship that I had with him." Schlitz doesn't play poker, but the song isn't really about a card game - it's about handling what life gives you, what some would call "playing the hand you're dealt." The "hold 'em/fold 'em" phrase became a common saying, and is one of those lyrics that sounds like it must have already existed in the collective consciousness, but Schlitz insists he had never heard it before when he came up with it.

When he was trying to make it as a songwriter, Don Schiltz had a much more sensible job as a computer operator at Vanderbilt University. The songwriter Bob McDill, whose popular compositions include "Good Ole Boys Like Me" (Don Williams) and "Gone Country" (Alan Jackson), was his mentor, and Schlitz says it was on a walk home from McDill's office when he wrote most of this song. He typed out the words when he got home, but didn't have an ending. It took him about six more weeks to complete the story with the old poker player drifting off at the end.

Don Schlitz wrote this song in August 1976 when he was 23 years old. It took two years of shopping the song around Nashville before Bobby Bare recorded it on his album Bare at the urging of Shel Silverstein. Bare's version didn't catch on and was never released as a single, but other musicians took notice and recorded the song in 1978, including Johnny Cash, who put it on his album Gone Girl. It was Kenny Rogers who finally broke the song loose, in a version produced by Larry Butler. His rendition was a #1 Country hit and even made its way to the Hot 100 at a time when country songs rarely crossed over.