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:

I have had my fun, if I don't get well no more

My health is failing me, and I'm going down slow

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:

• Duane Allman on the 1972 Anthology compilation
• The Animals on the 1966 Animalism
• 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"
• Eric Burdon and Jimmy Witherspoon on their 1971 album Guilty
• Canned Heat on their 1967 debut album
• Ray Charles
• Eric Clapton on 1998's Pilgrim
• Champion Jack Dupree on his 1958 Atlantic recording Blues from the Gutter
• The Electric Flag as a bonus track released on a reissue of A Long Time Comin' (1968)
• Aretha Franklin on 1967's Aretha Arrives
• Free on their 1968 debut, Tons of Sobs
• Davey Graham on the 1964 Folk, Blues & Beyond...
• Elmore James
• B. B. King and Bobby Bland on 1974's Together for the First Time...Live
• Led Zeppelin during the Whole Lotta Love medley on the live How the West Was Won
• Huey Lewis and the News on the 1994 album Four Chords & Several Years Ago
• Memphis Slim & Roosevelt Sykes
• Little Walter (Marion Walter Jacobs) also recorded an uptempo version with the same words under the title "I've Had My Fun"
• Alan Price
• Muddy Waters and Johnny Winter
• Jimmy Witherspoon
• Phish performed the song live twice (9/13/90 and 9/14/90)
• Eric Bibb
• Lightnin Hopkins
• Patrice O'neal