The first time I heard this tune was on Ricky Jay’s collection of songs about cards and card players. Subsequently, I heard Steve Earle’s story about how, when he was playing some dive for 4 or 5 people, Townes Van Zandt stumbles in and starts heckling him. It’s Outlaw Country lore: Townes demands Earle play Wabash Cannonball- repeatedly. Finally, Steve demurs, claiming not to know the song, but lays this - Towne’s own lyrically impossible gauntlet, line perfect, on his drunken hero, and thus begins a legendary friendship. 

The words fly by so fast here that it’s hard to follow the narrative, which upon some study, reveals a poignant tale of a royal pair of Anthropomorphic, married playing cards doing battle through the avatars of Mud and Gold - a couple of hapless gambling addicts. The overall message being that winning and losing are matters of destiny, dictated by the fates, and beyond our control, so you might as well keep raising the stakes. Townes, an acknowledged tortured genius whose untimely death at age 52, left behind a sumptuous body of work, kept raising his stakes, living his addict’s life as though his demise was pre-ordained. Even with this song, which he claimed was not written by himself, but by a “giant pencil in the sky”. 

Is it odd that Mr Mudd and Mr Gold would qualify as a “sunny” song? Not to me. Maybe that’s because I loved Ricky Jay’s winking panache, and he introduced it to me. Plus, Townes’s break-neck torrent of lyrical showmanship is a thrill ride, and I smile as my brain endeavors to keep up with the writer’s masterstrokes. Also, a good, ripping yarn will always bring a smile.