Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold

The song is an allegory built on a game of five-card stud. Townes told Lola Sweeny, who wrote the liner notes for the Tomato reissues, that it poured out of him in a frenzy and that he wrote so fast his hands were aching. "Even I don't know what that song means," he said.

In Be Here to Love Me, Steve Earle says the song figured in his first meeting with Townes. Earle was playing to an empty Houston club when a drunken Van Zandt sat in the front row and heckled him to play Wabash Cannonball, and Earle answered by playing this song, which stunned him into silence. Earle recorded it on Townes in 2009, trading verses with his son Justin Townes Earle. Townes sang it at the Old Quarter in 1973, on the WBAI broadcast of 1970 and at the Whole Coffeehouse at the University of Minnesota in 1973.