Louis Armstrong brought the song to lasting fame through his 1928 recording, on which Don Redman is named as composer; later releases credit "Joe Primrose", a pseudonym used by musician manager, music promoter and publisher Irving Mills.
In 1927, Fess Williams and his Royal Flush Orchestra became the first to record the song (under the name "Gambler's Blues") crediting Carl Moore and Phil Baxter.
In 1932 Rodgers recorded "Gambling Bar Room Blues", co-written with Shelly Lee Alley, with a similar melody but new lyrics and themes of alcohol abuse, violence and despair.
[11] More recently, the song has been performed by cabaret surrealists The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo in Southern California; the band's vocalist and songwriter, Danny Elfman, citing Cab Calloway as his inspiration.
The Louis Armstrong on a 1928 Okeh Records release is the exemplar of the shorter, A version:[44] I went down to St. James Infirmary, Saw my baby there, Stretched out on a long white table, So cold, so sweet, so fair.
The B-type versions, including Moore & Baxter's "Gambler's Blues", begin and end with a framing backstory, in which a narrator encounters a patron of "Joe's bar room", named Joe McKinney, or similar, and tells the song's story in the very words he said, with the song ending back in the bar room, drinking another shot of booze.
The hallmark of nearly all the variants is the uncanny pivot from the visitor initially mourning his deceased victim, to boasts about himself and how she'll miss him, to instructions for his own grand funeral:[45] Let her go, let her go, God bless her Wherever she may be She can search this world wide over But she'll never find a sweet man like me.
Many versions include additional funeral instructions: Sixteen coal-black horses, All hitch to a rubber-tired hack, Carried seven girls to the graveyard, And only six of 'em coming' back.
Six crap shooters as pall bearers Let a chorus girl sing me a song With a jazz band on my hearse To raise hell as we go along.
[47] Bob Dylan's 1981 homage, "Blind Willie McTell", contained musical references to both "Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues" and "St. James Infirmary".
The term "lock hospital" referred to a facility in which first lepers and later people suffering from venereal disease were isolated and confined.
"[51]: 21 Lloyd's second article is cited as a reference by Kenneth Goldstein in his liner notes for a 1960 Folkways LP called The Unfortunate Rake.
[52] There is some difficulty in this because the hospital in question closed in 1532 when Henry VIII acquired the land to build St James's Palace.
Another difficulty is that, out of the early versions of the song mentioned in the references given by Goldstein, only the one collected by Cecil Sharp in the Appalachians in 1918, and one found in Canada in the 1920s, make use of the phrase "St. James".
The liner notes link the Rake to an early fragment called "My Jewel, My Joy", stating that it was heard in Dublin.
"The Unfortunate Rake" (traditional song: this variation is from a 1960 Folkways LP edited by Goldstein, where it was sung by A L Lloyd, and is also the version given by Harwood, apparently using the same source.