What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (1)

I haven’t done a post in this series for a long, long time. This one, in fact, began life as a Midweek Music Break — or so I thought — a year ago. But then things happened…

[Image: an interesting excerpt from the 1910 census records for Harrison County, Texas. Click the image to view the whole width of the census page, squeezed into your browser window; click here to see it really enlarged.]

When I heard “Goodnight, Irene” for the first time, I had no idea what I was hearing. It was one of those random drive-by TV moments, back in the early 1980s — the dark middle period of purposeful TV viewing: that period during which you might catch a scrap of something wonderful as you monkeyed with the (circular) channel selector, but if you hadn’t known about the show in advance, well, sorry pal — it was already gone.

The show in question was a PBS documentary about a folk-singing troupe, The Weavers. I didn’t know much about them; they’d peaked in the public eye years before I started paying anything like real attention to music. (Among their founding members, in 1940: Pete Seeger — bottom left in the photo over there, with the banjo. Him, I certainly recognized, but only as a solo performer.) By the time the documentary was made, the surviving members were elderly, and the Carnegie Hall concert it featured would be their last performance together.

So anyhow, the show is playing on the TV. Because I’ve tuned to this channel late in the program, almost the very end, their last song — the bittersweet finale — is almost done. In fact, I catch only the very last chorus:

Good night, Irene
Good night, Irene
I’ll see you in my dreams…

Huge applause from the Carnegie audience; a jumble of emotions fluttering over the faces of the performers.

What a sweet and wistful song, I think to myself. And then for thirty years I forget all about “Goodnight, Irene.”

In all that time, I knew the song was out there somewhere; those closing lines had stuck in my head, see? But it was gone, until I decided to make it the subject of (so I thought) a Midweek Music Break here…

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In the early 1930s, a convict in a Louisiana prison was serving his third prison term. His course through life, and through the criminal justice system specifically, did not encourage optimism about his future:

His first conviction — in Texas, in 1915 at about 30 years of age — had resulted from a fight somehow involving a woman. (That last detail, although vague, may be significant to our story.) The charge had been reduced to “carrying a pistol,” and the sentence was superficially minor: 30 days. But those 30 days were to be served on a chain gang. After three days, the young man had had enough. He managed to escape and, using the alias “Walter Boyd,” moved to DeKalb, Texas.

His second significant run-in with the law, in 1917, was more serious. He’d been (again) involved in a fight, over a woman (!); his adversary had been shot and killed. No one came forward as a witness, but our still young “Walter Boyd” was arrested and convicted of both homicide and assault with intent to kill. The sentence this time was heavier: seven to thirty years at Sugarland Penitentiary, in Texas.

Once again, he managed to avoid serving a full term. This time around, though, he used a more creative approach: in 1925, a little before reaching his seven-year minimum, his sentence was suddenly commuted by Pat N. Neff, on the last day of his term as Texas governor — because of a song Boyd had written in his honor. (That’s Neff over there on the right, in a photo taken in 1924.) Neff himself told the story this way, in his 1925 memoir Battles for Peace:

On one of the [prison] farms, during my administration, was a negro as black as a stack of black cats at midnight. I visited a number of times, during the four years, the farm where he worked, and on each visit he sang a song which was a petition for pardon set to music. This negro would pick his banjo, pat his foot, roll his eyes, and show his big white teeth as he caroled forth in negro melody his musical application for pardon. In one verse he mentioned his wife; in another, his home; and I recall the third, closing with these words:

I know my mother will faint and shout,
When the train rolls up and I come stepping out.

Then, with much negro pathos and in full confidence, he sang:

If I had the Governor where the Governor has me,
I would, before morning, set the Governor free.

I listened to this song every visit for four years, and the day before I went out of office I pardoned the singer. He had been in the penitentiary some seven years, and had proved himself to be a trustworthy convict.

(This self-serving account made Neff sound rather more generous than he in fact was. Consider: his predecessor as governor had pardoned around 3,000 prisoners; Neff, exactly two. In the convict’s own recollection of Neff’s first visit, the governor said: “Walter, I’m gonna give you a pardon. But I ain’t gonna give it to you now. I’m gonna keep you down here to play for me when I come, but when I get out of office I’m gonna turn you loose.”)

Besides his freedom, the convict — whose real name was not Walter Boyd, but Huddie Ledbetter — walked out of Sugarland with something else: a new nickname: Lead Belly.*

Opinions differ about the source of the nickname. It seems obvious to me that it plays on his surname. But one source notes that Sugarland housed two other singing convicts, one known as Ironhead and the other, Clear Rock, and so “Lead Belly” was obviously the same sort of wordplay. (The same source says the nickname alluded to Lead Belly’s acting as the lead man on the prison work gangs — a claim which I’d find more plausible if that form of the word “lead” weren’t pronounced with a long e, rhyming with creed.) In his brief biographical sketch of Lead Belly, Langston Hughes says, “”…his last name got changed to Leadbelly… also probably because he was hard as nails, tough as steel, and durable as lead.”

Wherever his nickname came from, in preparing this writeup I was very surprised to learn that his first name should be pronounced with a long u, not a short one — something like HYOO-dee. Look at that census record highlighted at the top of this post. See the misspelling: Hudy? That makes it plainer.

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[Photo: Compound Number 1 at Angola State Penitentiary, July 1934. The back of the photo (from a Lomax photo archive) says that Lead Belly is in the foreground. In fact, he is apparently the convict which you can see highlighted in red by clicking on the image.]

By 1930, Lead Belly seems to have gotten the message that he probably didn’t have much of a future hanging around in East Texas. He’d moved back to the area in Louisiana where he’d been born and raised, and had a common-law wife to take the place of the real one he’d left back in Texas.

But he hadn’t left behind the background of race relations in the Deep South of the time. That year, he got in yet another fight on a public street. No woman seems to have been involved this time around. Unfortunately, his antagonists this time around were three white men. Someone had jostled someone else on a sidewalk; one thing led to another, Lead Belly defended himself with a knife, and although no one was killed, one of the white men ended up in the hospital with knife wounds. His one-day trial a few weeks later once more sent him to prison — this time, for five to ten years for attempted murder, at the notorious Angola State Penitentiary.

There, in 1932, he finally encountered “white folks” in a position not just to let him live but to actively save his life, all of them sharing the same last name: Lomax.

The patriarch of the family, John Lomax Sr. — also known as John A. Lomax — had worked for a bank in Dallas but in 1931 lost his job there (thanks to the Depression). His two sons, John Jr. and Alan, encouraged their father to take up his real passion: studying and collecting folk music, as evidenced by his 1910 book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (which included an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt). John Jr. had worked for a different bank, and also lost his job; he offered to help with the folk songs “until I can find a job that pays.”

John A. apparently didn’t need much convincing. By 1933, he had met with enough people and worked enough old connections to have in hand: (a) a contract with Macmillan Publishing for an anthology of American folk music, concentrating on black “sinful” songs; (b) a position with the Library of Congress to travel the country, recording folk music from the mouths and instruments of its original performers; (c) a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, funding the cross-country trip as long as he deposited the recordings with a library of his choice; and (d) a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, paying for a brand new aluminum-disc (!) recorder and for repairs to John A.’s car. He’d set out on the tour, with both of his sons (John Jr. eventually leaving when he found a new job). And in 1933, John A. had been named “Honorary Consultant” to the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Music. (Stipend: one dollar annually, plus expenses.)

Finally, in July, 1933, John A. and Alan Lomax first visited the prison in Angola, Louisiana, to record the songs of black convicts — especially those working the notorious chain gangs. Among the recordings they came away with: this little jewel, going by the simple name “Irene.”

When I heard that little clip, I realized: this isn’t any damned little sad-and-wistful lyric, and I don’t care what I heard — or thought I heard — back in the ’80s. Did he actually sing “I’ll get you in my dreams” there…?

[The story continues in Part 2 of this “What’s in a Song?” post. You may also be interested in Part 3, which surveys more recent cover versions of “Goodnight, Irene.”]
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* There’s no real consensus about whether it should appear as one word or two. The man himself made it two, more often than not, so that’s what I’ll do unless quoting someone else’s spelling.