The Best Cribbage Song You Never Heard Of

I was looking for fun cribbage facts the past few days and while I couldn’t find any good cribbage jokes, I did find an interesting song about cribbage called “One for His Nob (The Cribbage Song.” It was done by a British artist, Richard Thompson. It’s included with another song by him entitled “Meet on the Ledge.” See the credit below and in the YouTube video description.

ADDENDUM 7/16/2025: The video below for the song “One for his nob” has vanished, unfortunately. I found another one called “The Crib Song” by Brett Kessler. You can find out more on my post from 7/16/2025 “Whoops, The One for his nob Cribbage Song Vanished.”

Anyway, the song “One for his Nob” is full of references to cribbage lingo, a lot of which is hard to catch because the tune is so fast. One of the terms is “19 in the box,” which refers to a score of zero in what American cribbage players call the “crib.” A no score in cribbage is often called 19 because that score is impossible. The term “one for his nob” is also standard cribbage lingo for holding the Jack of the same suit as the cut card.

Sena and I thought it would be fun to record a video of us playing cribbage so we could play it back along with Thompson’s song. The thing is I had to speed up the video because it took us a little over 10 minutes to play a cribbage game just to 60 instead of 120. It felt frenetic, but it fits the song a little better because the song is 2 min and 44 seconds long.

If you play the YouTube vide of “One for His Nob” just right and watch our speeded-up video of us playing cribbage, it’s funny. In fact, it just so happened that Sena scored a point twice in the game because she got the nob Jack in two separate hands.

I’ve included the regular speed video of our cribbage game for comparison.

“One for His Nob” is a song about cribbage recorded by British singer-song writer Richard Thompson. It was published by Avon Records and released on July 1, 2015.

Unknown's avatar

Author: James Amos

I'm a retired consult-liaison psychiatrist. I navigated the path in a phased retirement program through the hospital where I was employed. I was fully retired as of June 30, 2020. This blog chronicles my journey.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.