If You Lose Your Money

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee are two of our all-time favorite blues artists. Back in the late 1950s, the pair recorded an incredible album for Smithsonian Folkways called "Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry Sing.” It was from that album that we took our inspiration for this blues with which we often open or close a rehearsal session, just because it's so much fun to play. Now, we don’t do the tune the way Sonny and Brownie did it; the whole “folk process” idea calls on us all to bring our own style and attitude to the music we play. And that was something that Sonny and Brownie certainly knew, because they too were building on the blues they had heard from their heroes. The evidence is that the song’s provocative key line — “If you lose your money, please don’t lose your mind” — didn’t originate with them. Back in 1936, Blind Boy Fuller used exactly the same line in his recording of “Keep Away From My Woman.” But it didn’t start with him either; seven years earlier, in 1929, Blind Joe Reynolds used the same line to open his tune, “Outside Woman Blues,” a song, incidentally, that would be covered 40 years later by the rock group Cream. So, hey, the bottom line is we’re in very good company in offering our take on the tune. Here it is, then, from a recent Flood rehearsal, with a double helping of solos from everyone, Doug, the two Pauls, Vanessa and Sam. It’s “If You Lose Your Money.”