“Two Glasses, Joe” is a Cindy Walker song that Ernest Tubb recorded in Nashville on 22 June 1954, at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel, with Paul Cohen producing. Decca issued it that year as the A-side of Decca 29220, backed with Tubb’s own “Journey’s End.” It entered Billboard’s country chart in October 1954 and climbed to number 11.
The lyric is a barroom monologue. A man asks the bartender, Joe, to set up a second glass and turn the jukebox down so he can pretend the woman he lost is still sitting beside him. Another man has won her, he admits, but no one can stop him dreaming, and her memory follows him wherever he goes; he ends by asking Joe to fill both glasses and leave him alone with them.
Walker, a Texas writer whose songs were recorded by Bob Wills, Eddy Arnold and a long line of others, wrote it; Tubb’s session band was his own Texas Troubadours, Billy Byrd on guitar, Dickie Harris on steel and Jack Drake on bass, alongside Nashville studio players Grady Martin on guitar, Farris Coursey on drums and Owen Bradley on piano.
Tex Ritter took the song up on his 1967 album of Cindy Walker material, Bump Tiddil Dee Bum Bum!, and Tubb came back to it late in his career as “Set Up Two Glasses, Joe,” sharing the vocal with Ferlin Husky on The Legend and the Legacy.
