Mojo - The Music Magazine

In any decent record collection, you won't riffle far before you come across a song about cards, or gambling. It might be Janis Joplin's Coo Coo ("Jack o' diamonds, I know you of old..."), or Lady GaGa's Poker Face ("I wanna hold 'em like they do in Texas, please"). Sometimes the song only sounds like it's about gambling (like AC/DC's The Jack - Aussie slang for a popular STD); sometimes, as with the doomed game that brings misery in Jim Ford's Harlan County or Lloyd Price's version of the evergreen Stagger Lee, gambling is exactly what it's about, whether in the form of a poker game, blackjack or craps.

Here's 5 of the hottest.

1) Ace Of Spades - Motörhead

"You win some, you lose some - it's all the same to me," sings Lemmy in this classic rocker, and here the theme and the inspiration are the same. A song about chance and card games, Ace Of Spades was first conceived while Lemmy was playing poker with his bandmates and travelling at 100mph down the Autobahn.

2) Lily, Rosemary & The Jack Of Hearts - Bob Dylan

From Dylan's classic Blood On The Tracks, Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts is a perfect example of the stripped-down style he rediscovered in the mid-'70s. Nearly nine minutes long, its plot is winding and complex. The Jack of Hearts is a card, but he's also a man - the suave lothario heading a gang of bank robbers; and also, a symbol of the thing you want but will never hold in your hand.

3) Deuces Are Wild - Aerosmith

Linking love, sex and the chance that comes with card and dice games, Aerosmith's Deuces Are Wild hangs on Steve Tyler's pun, "I love you 'cause your deuces are wild, girl". Deuces are the twos in a pack of cards - sometimes appointed "wild" in a game of poker (especially 5-card draw), meaning it can be played as any card you like. But here a deuce is also a pair of lovers and, perhaps, a certain "dual" part of the female anatomy? Another section of the lyric provides a hint: 'It's you that's in my dreams I'm beggin' for / But I woke up when someone slammed the door / So hard I fell outta bed'. Gambling, indeed!

4) Deacon Blues - Steely Dan

A classic track about the role of chance in life, this Steely Dan staple, from their 1977 album Aja, is all about life's winners or losers, with a cool nickname for the former, like University Of Alabama gridiron team ("they call Alabama the Crimson Tide"). But Donald Fagen's loser gambler identifies instead with Wake Forest University (NC)'s perennially underachieving Demon Deacons, so that's why he asks "call me Deacon Blues". Fame and fortune dealt with in that idiosyncratic Steely Dan sort of way.

5) House of The Rising Sun - The Animals

Coming to the Geordie R&B growlers via Northumbrian folk singer Johnny Handle - though it's a safe bet they'd heard versions by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, perhaps even Dave Van Ronk - House... is a venerable American ballad with roots in British folk. In this incarnation, the narrator's father is a drunken, rambling gambler, and his roistering ways have been handed down to our hero, who is headed to jail, or marriage - it's unclear. Often deemed the first folk-rock hit, The Animals' version is so dramatic that when Dylan first heard it, he "jumped out of his car seat".

This article was sponsored by Ladbrokes