Goin' Down Slow

"Goin' Down Slow" or "Going Down Slow" is a blues song written by St. Louis Jimmy Oden, originally released in 1941. Howlin' Wolf included the song on his 1962 Rocking Chair Album.

The song alternates between sung and spoken passages. The sung passages are the reflections of a dying man:

Please write my mother, tell her the shape I'm in

Tell her to pray for me, forgive me for my sin

The spoken passages (by Willie Dixon on Wolf's release) deal with relationship:

Now looka here...

I did not say I was a millionaire...

But I said I have spent more money than a millionaire!

Cause if I had've kept all my money that I'd already spent,

I would've been a millionaire a looong time ago...

Due largely to Wolf's recording, it has since become a blues standard, and has been recorded by countless blues and rock artists, including:

The Animals on the 1966 Animalism
Aretha Franklin on 1967's Aretha Arrives
Canned Heat on their 1967 debut album
Elmore James
Free on their 1968 debut, Tons of Sobs
Duane Allman on the 1972 Anthology compilation
Led Zeppelin during the Whole Lotta Love medley on the live How the West Was Won
Little Walter
B. B. King and Bobby Bland on 1974's Together for the First Time...Live
Huey Lewis & the News on the 1994 Four Chords & Several Years Ago
Eric Clapton on 1998's Pilgrim
Jeff Beck and Tom Jones on 2003's "Red, White and Blues" soundtrack to the Mike Figgis film.
Mike Bloomfield on 1994 "Don't Say That I Ain't Your Man! : Essential Blues, 1964-1969"