"Kansas City Shuffle" is a song by jazz pianist Bennie Moten

Bennie Moten

Bennie Moten was a noted American jazz pianist and band leader born in Kansas City, Missouri.He led the Kansas City Orchestra, the most important of the itinerant, blues-based orchestras active in the Midwest in the 1920s, and helped to develop the riffing style that would come to define many of...

. It was recorded in 1926 in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

 and released on the Victor

RCA Records

RCA Records is one of the flagship labels of Sony Music Entertainment. The RCA initials stand for Radio Corporation of America , which was the parent corporation from 1929 to 1985 and a partner from 1985 to 1986.RCA's Canadian unit is Sony's oldest label...

 record label.

The song refers to an advanced form of confidence game employing misdirection, subterfuge, and playing on the "mark's" arrogance and/or self-loathing. The relevance to a direction stated at the beginning of a situation has no bearing to the outcome.

In popular culture

The storyline of the 2006 drama/thriller Lucky Number Slevin

Lucky Number Slevin

Lucky Number Slevin, renamed for the German/USA DVDs as Lucky # Slevin , is a 2006 crime thriller film written by Jason Smilovic, directed by Paul McGuigan and starring Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci, and Lucy Liu...

uses a "Kansas City Shuffle" as the primary plot device

Plot device

A plot device is an object or character in a story whose sole purpose is to advance the plot of the story, or alternatively to overcome some difficulty in the plot....

. As Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis

Walter Bruce Willis , better known as Bruce Willis, is an American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles...

) mentions, "A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left." The origin of its name is revealed when a cover version

Cover version

In popular music, a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a contemporary or previously recorded, commercially released song or popular song...

 of the song, performed by J. Ralph

J. Ralph

J. Ralph- American born, New York, 1975. Has no formal training and does not read or write a single note of music. A self-taught composer, songwriter and producer from New York City, his professional career began at 22 with the signing to the prestigious Atlantic Records by label president Jason...

, plays at the end of the film. Ralph is a friend of the writer of Lucky Number Slevin. There is a reference to the fact that "you can't have a 'Kansas City Shuffle' without a body", pointing out the importance of misdirection. The final line of the movie also refers to the final line of the song.