Do you remember it? I haven’t thought about it in decades but I certainly remember it. Looking it up in Wikipedia there have been so many covers that I have no idea what version I heard. The song was written when I was one year old in 1947 so I suppose one the 1960s covers is what I recall.
And the whole, rhythmic, talking blues style reminds me of Charlie Daniels’ “Uneasy Rider”.That song always cracks me up. I just listened to it again and I laughed throughout it. And it’s the only Charlie Daniels song without a swamp
I remember that song very well. My dad played acoustic guitar and it was one of the songs he always played. With a cigarette in the ashtray, of course.
My dad quit also, when a heart attack took him at 56 years of age. He loved cigarettes, was in excellent health and physically a near perfect specimen.
My mother smoked most of her life. One positive result was that my brothers and I hated the smell of those damn things. None of us ever touched them.
When I would grimace at her cigarette smoke, she would confidently assure me that she had felt the way when she was my age. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it”.
A negative result was that my mother came down with vascular dementia, which removed her mental and physical faculties for the last ten years of her life.
I know the song from high school–our school had a video production class that did the “news” every morning. It featured campus announcements and then short “slice of student life” video pieces. One person did a piece on our school’s student smoking section (this was in the 90s-I dont think schools have those anymore) and they used that song as the music for the video.
I remember it very well, also from the late Eisenhower years. My father smoked a lot, including during dinner, although he graciously but ineffectually tried to blow his smoke away from the table. I’ve had asthma all my life, probably not a result of his smoking, but the smoking didn’t help it either.
I don’t remember whose version of the song we had. Not Tex Williams anyway, it was a man with a reverberant bass-baritone voice. I used to play it a lot, hoping the message might get through. He finally did quit, after I left home (thanks, Dad), although he later backslid and sneaked cigarettes in the garage, as if that fooled anyone. Then later he really did quit, and he lived to be 87 with nary a sign of lung cancer or emphysema. My mother’s father died in his sleep from emphysema at 74, and I was surprised he lasted that long, after hearing him coughing all the time. Damn, but I hate smoking and tobacco companies.
I remember noticing that the pedal steel riff during the last verse (“Now life ain’t nothin’ but a poker game…”) is identical to the riff in Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000”.
