Don Schlitz died Thursday in Nashville, at a local hospital, of what the Associated Press described as a sudden illness. He was 73. [1] He had written "The Gambler" at the age of 23. It is a song whose structural claim — that a man must know when to hold, when to fold, when to walk away, and when to run — is the kind of claim a 23-year-old is in no position to make. He made it anyway. Kenny Rogers recorded it in 1978. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2018. [2] Schlitz lived another fifty years, and spent most of them finding out whether the claim had been earned.

The song is a conversation on a train between a narrator and an old gambler who trades a sip of whiskey and the last of his cigarettes for a piece of advice. The advice is simple. It is also the kind of advice people actually repeat to one another at important moments — at divorces, in recovery, in rooms where careers end. It is a rare thing in American popular song: a lyric that outlived its context and became a folk aphorism of general use.

Schlitz wrote it in his Nashville apartment at 23. He was the night-shift computer operator at Vanderbilt. [3] The first draft did not include the last verse. That verse, with the line about the best one can hope for being to die in your sleep, was added at a friend's suggestion. The song went nowhere for three years. Then Bobby Bare recorded it. Then Johnny Cash. Then Kenny Rogers on an album called The Gambler, and the song became something else.

The rest of the career ran through "Forever and Ever, Amen" (Randy Travis, 1987 — two Grammys, country Song of the Year), "On the Other Hand" (Travis, 1986), and a long tail of cuts by Travis Tritt, Alan Jackson, Kathy Mattea, Mary Chapin Carpenter. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2017. [4] He did not perform publicly after the mid-eighties; he did not need to. Eighty number-one country singles bear his name.

His craft was of a specific register. He wrote stories, not moods. He wrote dialogue into choruses. He wrote men defined by the choices still in front of them rather than by the ones already made. The line Americans will quote this weekend is not the chorus. It is the quieter one: "Every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser." The sentence is true in the way Joan Didion's best sentences were true — neither consoling nor brutal, simply observed.

The career reads two ways. Either he was a very young man who had the luck to find a phrasing that would survive him, or he was a writer who had arrived at 23 at a way of seeing most writers never accept. The catalogue is the evidence of the second. He is survived by his wife Sandy and their children. The Opry announced a tribute segment. [5] The radio stations, all weekend, will cycle through the songs.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York