The Jazz Detective at Work

Will Friedwald has written several articles in this column about the great jazz detectives who unravel the tangled histories of past performances. Now Will puts on his deerstalker hat and tries to solve one of these mysteries on his own. T.G.

In the 1950s, the song "Ace in the Hole" was a staple of dixieland revival bands—nearly all of them played it: Turk Murphy, Bob Scobey, Lu Watters & Yerba Buena Jazz Band, The Dukes of Dixieland—and, on the English "trad" side of the pond, Humphrey Lyttelton, Lonnie Donegan, and Kenny Ball. Further, it was picked up by jazz and pop singers who were looking for an unusual piece of material: Anita O'Day, not known for her fondness for old-timey tunes, cut it in 1947, and Bobby Darin recorded it on several occasions, famously as a duet with Johnny Mercer (on their classic Two of a Kind album) and also by himself live at The Flamingo in Las Vegas.

It's a marvelous, vivid song; the lyric has the feeling of being antique and contemporary at the same time. "Ace In the Hole" sounds like an old song, something you'd hear on a player piano in an old-timey saloon, but the general idea of the lyric is overtly cynical in a way that's indescribably modern. You can't trust this world and this life, the text tells us, so you have to be prepared to surprise your adversaries with a secret weapon; you have to do some business on the side, and have a special advantage that nobody knows about. Life is a card game, and everyone is bluffing. The only way not to get taken is to out-con all the other con-men out there.

The song is the grandmother of all gambling analogy songs, from "Wheel of Fortune" to "The Gambler." (If any singer wants to do an album of such songs, write me. There's "Solitaire," "The Queen of Hearts is Missing," "From a Jack to a King," "The Cincinnati Kid," and "Losing Hand," for starters.) Early in the song, the narrator even advises that the best way to keep a step ahead of the wolf at the door is to keep a string "of girls on the old Tenderloin." In other words, it's hard out here for a pimp.

Because of the conflicting elements of the song, I could never tell if "Ace In the Hole" was an actual turn-of-the-century tune, or if it was a new song composed in the 1950s, possibly from a musical show or film, deliberately written in the style of an old time song. The major factor which seemed to settle the point me is that I never came across any vintage recordings of "Ace in the Hole"; for years I couldn't find any trace of it from prior to the mid-1940s.

Further confounding my confusion, the title "Ace in the Hole" is not unique to this song. Before we proceed any further, let me clarify that the "Ace In the Hole" that we're concerned with here the song in which the central refrain begins, "Some of them write to the old folks for coin / And that's their ace in the hole." (The song usually starts, however, with the verse, "This town is full of guys / Who think they're mighty wise.") The first "other" "Ace In the Hole" is a jazz instrumental from 1926. Cole Porter then used the title for a song in his 1941 show Let's Face It. Porter's "Ace in the Hole" has also been widely recorded, by Ella Fitzgerald (on The Cole Porter Songbook) and any number of cabaret and musical theater oriented performers, like Hildegarde, Mabel Mercer, Johnny Mathis, and Bobby Short. (The refrain to the Porter song begins, "Sad times may follow your tracks.")

Because a song title can't be copyrighted, in more recent decades there have been other songs named "Ace in the Hole”—there is one written by country giant George Straight, while BMI also lists an earlier hillbilly "Ace" by Merle Travis and Hank Thompson. The country-rock band Little Feat used the song as well, and so did Paul Simon on his 1980 album-film project One Trick Pony.

As near as I can figure it out, the provenance of our "Ace in the Hole" is as follows. It was apparently written in 1909 by a team of songwriters named Jack Dempsey and George Mitchell; who they were and whatever else they wrote, I couldn't tell you. I have no way of knowing how popular the song actually was in 1909, but after consulting with a number of prominent historians of the early recording industry, most notably the redoubtable Tim Brooks, it seems very likely that there is no early recording of the song.

The first "Ace in the Hole" on records is not the Dempsey-Mitchell song, but a hot stomp co-credited to two giants of early jazz, the Italian-born trumpeter Louis Panico and Chicago composer-pianist Elmer Schoebel. The 1926 "Ace in the Hole" was very popular among hot bands in the very early years of electrical recording: it was waxed by any number of groups with colorful appellations typical of the jazz age: Al Katz and his Kittens, The University Six (a California Ramblers spin off with Tommy Dorsey and Adrian Rollini), Earl Gresh and His Gangplank Orchestra (a band that made a big splash), Black Diamond Serenaders (apparently a pseudonym for The Original Indiana Five), and Abe Lyman and his Californians (recording in New York). There were also at least two recordings made by early German jazz bands in Berlin (as listed in Tom Lord's Online Jazz Discography).

This is the opening of a longer blog entry by Will Friedwald. For the full article, click on the arrow below.

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