“Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” is a traditional song. The earliest known recording is Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers’ “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues,” made in New York for Columbia on 27 July 1925. Poole sang and played banjo, Posey Rorer played fiddle and Norman Woodlief guitar. Columbia issued it as Columbia 15038-D, paired with “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister?,” and it sold more than 100,000 copies, at a time when an average Columbia country record sold about 5,000.
The song reached Poole from a musician in his own part of North Carolina. Tyler Meeks, a seventeen-year-old in the Eden area in 1911, learned “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” from the guitarist Charlie Blackstock at a store in the Black community of Blue Creek; Meeks later taught it to Poole. Kinney Rorrer’s biography of Poole, Rambling Blues, tells the same story: Poole already knew the tune, and the words came from a musician who had learned them from a local Black guitarist. The phrase itself refers to the Georgia Skin Game, a card game in which a dealer’s deal can “fall,” and the lyric is made of verses that turn up in other songs.
The singer says he has been all around the world and down in sunny Alabama, and that his mother always told him never to let his deal go down until his last gold dollar is gone. The last time he saw his girl she was standing in the door and said she would be a long time gone. He ends by heading down the railroad track with his rocking chair, and says that if the blues will not leave his mind he will rock himself away from there.
Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys recorded it on 24 March 1957 at the Bradley Film & Recording Studio in Nashville. Flatt sang lead, Curly Seckler tenor, Scruggs baritone and Paul Warren sang bass; Flatt played guitar, Scruggs banjo, Seckler mandolin, Warren fiddle, Buck Graves Dobro and Roy Huskey Jr. bass. Columbia released it as a single, 4-40990, on 19 August 1957, with “Let Those Brown Eyes Smile at Me” on the other side.
Doc Watson, with Merle Watson, played it on the 1970 Vanguard album Doc Watson on Stage. Tony Trischka’s Banjoland (Rounder, 1977), recorded at Starday Studios in Nashville, has Tony Rice singing it, with Trischka, Bill Keith and Béla Fleck on banjos. Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs recorded it on 7 December 2002 for The Three Pickers, released in 2003, and the Earls of Leicester included it on their 2014 debut album.
