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Although recent events have inspired an email-circulated version featuring a soldier serving in Afghanistan, the tale about a serviceman using a deck of ordinary playing cards as an aid to prayer and meditation dates at least to at least 1788. The popular song Deck of Cards (sometimes known as A Soldier's Prayer Book) was written in 1948 by T. Texas Tyler and was recorded by (among others) Tex Ritter in 1948, Wink Martindale in 1959, and Bill Anderson in 1991. In that 1948 musical offering, the story is set during World War II and stars a soldier whose outfit, which has been fighting in North Africa, is newly arrived at Casino. One Sunday morning, some of the soldiers in that unit go to church; those who have prayer books read them during the service, but one soldier pulls out a deck of cards, prompting his sergeant to haul this apparent blasphemer before the provost marshal. In the emailed version of fifty-five years later, certain details about this prologue to the cards' meanings have been updated to better fit the current climate: the soldier sits alone in a bunkhouse rather than with his buddies in church because he's in a non-Christian country, and he turns to his deck of playing cards not because of a shortage of prayer books for the congregation but because Bibles are supposedly banned in Afghanistan. Once those scene-setting details are out of the way, the two versions dovetail, with the meanings of each of the cards agreeing from one version to the other. Differences between the two versions aside, is it an account of an actual event? The 1948 song concludes with Friends, I know this story is true, because I knew that soldier, a statement that on the surface would seem to confirm the veracity of the narrative. However, tellers of tales do sometimes add flourishes of such nature to their offerings, especially those of an inspirational or tear-jerking nature. Moreover, a broadsheet titled The Soldier's Prayer-Book which recounts the same story as the 1948 song Deck of Cards appears in an 1865 book about the history of playing cards. French versions of the tale were printed in 1778 and 1809. Throughout the years the story about the soldier, his playing cards, and his explanation of their meanings to a superior he's been brought before has gone by many names: Deck of Cards, The Soldier's Prayer Book, Cards Spiritualized. Some of the meanings assigned to the pasteboards have changed too: the queen symbolized the Queen of Sheba instead of Mary, and the jack was a knave. The older versions also mention the deck being divided into thirteen ranks, one for each (lunar) month, a detail dropped from more contemporary versions in recognition of modern society having moved away from the lunar calendar. Some point out that if you count up all the spots on the cards, you come up with only 364, not the 365 claimed. The 1865 version contained an explanation for that, which has also been dropped from newer accounts: Given that the tale has been in print since 1778, if the author of the 1948 song knew that soldier, as he claimed in the final line of the song, he was very long-lived indeed. Other catechism-type songs have been around for centuries. One such musical delight many (erroneously) think falls into this category is The 12 Days of Christmas, but a genuine example of the genre is A New Dial, a question-and-answer song dating to at least 1625, which assigns religious meanings to each of the twelve days of Christmas: More legends and superstitions about the meaning of various combinations of cards can be found here.
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