What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (2)

[Part 1 of this series is here.]

I’d heard The Weavers’ “sad, wistful” closing notes of “Goodnight, Irene.” I’d forgotten about the song for thirty-some years, but then decided (I did know of the song, after all) to make it the subject of a post here. A simple Midweek Music Break post, at that — not a full-blown What’s in a Song monster…

And finally, after researching it some, and researching it some more, I’d actually found and listened to a recording — the first — of Lead Belly singing it for John A. Lomax in 1933.

Here it is again, so you don’t have to go back to the earlier post just for it:

As I said at the end of Part 1, this confused the heck out of me. Far from the poignant I’ll see you in my dreams of The Weavers’ version, the narrator sounds as though he’s threatening to get her in his dreams. So much for the implied sigh, hmm?

Luckily for me, Lomax — who called the song simply “Irene” at the time, probably because Lead Belly did — transcribed the lyrics then. The complete song which Lead Belly eventually recorded went like this, per Lomax’s 1936 book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly:

Irene

[chorus]
Irene, goodnight, Irene, goodnight
Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene,
I’ll kiss you in my dreams

Sometimes I live in the country,
sometimes I live in town
Sometimes I haves a great notion,
To jump in the river and drown.

Last Saturday night, I got married,
Me and my wife settled down
Now me and my wife have parted,
Gonna take me a stroll uptown

I loves Irene, God knows I do,
I loves her till the sea runs dry
And if Irene turns her back on me,
I’ll take morphine and die.

Quit your rambling, quit your gambling
Quit your staying out late at night,
Go home to your wife and your family
Sit down by the fireside bright.

I was wrong about that get, then: kiss, like The Weavers’ see, is all nice and sentimental. [But see the note, below.] So it was sad and dreamy after all—

But sheesh: chorus aside, the actual verses… We’ve got a guy who seems to have casually left his wife of less than a week, for what? for the life of a rambling man, maybe sometimes living with her and sometimes alone? But he still and presumably forever will carry a torch for her — to the extent of threatening suicide (by drowning, by morphine overdose) if he ever thinks she’s given up on him…

What the heck kind of song was this, anyway?

It was, in short, Lead Belly‘s song which Lomax recorded. After all, the guy had certainly had plenty of complicated experience with women:

• In 1900, at age 15, he had a daughter with his then girlfriend, Margaret. Margaret moved to Dallas, and Huddie denied the child was his, but apparently intended to marry Margaret at some point.
• …but the 1910 census page at the top of my earlier post identified his wife as an Aletha, whom Huddie knew as “Lethe”; they were married in 1908.
• His 1915 arrest arose from a dispute about yet another woman.
• In 1918, his second daughter was born, to another girlfriend, Iola Boyd. By the time she was born, Huddie (“Walter Boyd”) was already in prison yet again, and he seems to have had nothing further to do with her or Iola.
• After leaving prison in 1925, Lead Belly/Huddie eventually landed in Louisiana… and “married” (?) one Era Washington. (Among other adventures during this time, he had his guitar smashed by Era in response to his, er, “infidelities.”)
• By 1927, he’d had a third daughter, with — yes! — another girlfriend, Lizzie Pugh.
• Still, when he received the 1930 assault/murder conviction which put him in Angola (where he’d meet the Lomaxes, and record “Irene”), his wife was listed as Era.
• Finally — although it came after that first recording — in January 1935, Huddie married Martha Promise. (Alan Lomax was best man.) Martha would be his “real” wife from then on.

So, checkered past, right? But look — Margaret, Aletha/Lethe, Iola, Era, Lizzie, Martha… not an Irene among them (unless maybe that one in 1915).

Still… this is art, right? The exact name doesn’t matter, right? Irene, Nadine, Evangeline, Jolene, who cares what her name is? It’s Lead Belly’s song, right? He can call her whatever he wants—

Except, well, it isn’t Lead Belly’s. It never was. The only thing about it that belonged to Lead Belly (although admittedly, a stunning “only thing”) was his performance, and maybe — maybe — some of the specifics of the verses.

Of course this series is about the song, not the songwriter. We’ll be moving on from Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter shortly, but we’re not quite through with him…

—

Huddie Ledbetter a/k/a Lead Belly never actually claimed to have written “Irene.” In fact, he said that he first learned it from his Uncle Terrell, in 1909. Terrell also apparently taught the song to another of Huddie’s uncles, Bob Ledbetter, who recorded it with the Lomaxes in 1940. Here’s Uncle Bob’s recording of the entire song:

While I haven’t found any listing of the song’s lyrics (let alone a recording) from back in 1909, when Huddie said he learned it, I did locate a song called “Sometimes I Lib in de Country,” as noted in 1915 by one E. C. Perrow in an article called “Songs and Rhymes from the South.” (You can see or download a copy of this article here.) All or a portion of the song is there transcribed as:

Sometimes I lib in de country,
En sometimes I lib in town;
En sometimes I hab uh notion
Tuh jump in de ribber en drown.

Perrow says this came from “East Tennessee negroes,” reciting it from memory in — yes! — 1909.

But we can dig back even further, as Charles K. Wolfe and Kip Lornell — authors of The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1992) — seem to have done, pretty definitively. First they connect the Ledbetters’ “Irene” to a song called “The Girls Won’t Do to Trust,” recorded in 1936 as performed by one Gilbert Fike of Little Rock, Arkansas (but originally of Louisiana).* A verse and the chorus of Fike’s song go like this (as cited by Wolfe):

The girl will chew tobacco, but she will raise a fuss
The girls will drink good whiskey, boys, but they won’t do to trust.

Irene, goodnight, Irene,
Irene, goodnight, my life,
I’ll kiss you in my dreams.

There’s no evidence that Fike knew Lead Belly or either of his uncles. And he (perhaps following someone else’s lead) seems to have simply grafted the chorus onto the older song by that name.

I found one version of “The Girls Won’t Do to Trust” in a book called The Autobiography of Uriah Hagans, originally published in 1906. (That’s Hagans in the photo at right, clipped from the title page of his book.)

Hagans styled himself “The Blind Man,” his blindness originating in a condition which he called “granulated [eye]lids.” (This turns out to be a real affliction, formally known as blepharitis, although nowadays it doesn’t often lead to blindness.) It left him with very little sight in his left eye, and none at all in his right, and eventually he lost the right eye completely in an accident with a horse’s bridle.

His eyesight left him unable to have much of a career common to late 19th-century men in the upper Midwest of Ohio and Indiana. So as an adult he made his way about as an entertainer — a fiddler and singer of folk and sacred songs. In his autobiography (actually published in a series of “editions,” starting in 1892), he wanted to set down for his children, and their children, not just the events and facts of his life but also a lot of the songs (lyrics only) which he’d acquired during his life.

Among these songs: “The Girls Won’t Do to Trust,” sans any “Irene” in the chorus or elsewhere. You can see the complete lyrics, as he set them down, at this page, but I wanted to highlight the chorus and one verse — especially to contrast the emphasized clause with Gilbert Fike’s version:

CHORUS
No, they won’t do to trust; no, they won’t do to trust;
I tell you, boys, I know them, and the girls won’t do to trust.

I know they are much nicer than ugly horrid men.
For they do not chew tobacco nor smoke nor swear like them;
They do not drink cheap whisky, they don’t get you on a bust;
But I tell you boys, I know them and the girls won’t do to trust.

Interesting, eh? Sometime between around 1897 (when Hagans set down those words in his “Second Edition”) and the mid-1930s (when Gilbert Fike recorded his version for the Lomaxes), at least one sense changed. Now an eventual connection with the chorus of “Goodnight, Irene” — with “Irene” herself, whoever she might have been — comes a little clearer. Irene not only deceives: she drinks good whisky to boot (presumably her man’s own good whisky).

No wonder the song’s poor (and no doubt considerably better behaved) narrator toyed with suicide, hmm? He’d been so badly misled, used and abused by his woman…

But damn it, the question lingers: Who was Irene?

—

[Image: promotional poster for Haverly’s United Mastodon Minstrels show]

The name “Irene” seems to have drawn 19th-century songwriters like a magnet. I’ve found references to at least the following in the Library of Congress’s collection:

• “Irene,” from The Book of Love (1848) (“Whether I love thee? Ask but the starlets / To whom I’ve often in agony sued…”)
• “Irene Waltz” (1850) (instrumental: “Firth, Pond, and Co., New York”)
• “Irene Polka” (1852) (instrumental: “To Miss Irene L. White, of New York” also by “Firth, Pond, and Co., New York”)
• Another “Irene Waltz” (1853) (instrumental: “Composed for and dedicated to Mrs. S.A. Irene Knauff, by Geo. P. Knauff”)
• “Irene Schottische“ (1870)
• “My Little Lost Irene” (1877) (“I see a winsome, girlish face, with eyes of azure blue…”)

Of course, none of these seem to be our Irene. (That would be too easy.) For her, we’ve got to turn to another corner of the century’s pop culture: minstrel shows, and what was commonly referred  to as “negro music.”

J.H. Haverly was to blackface minstrel shows of the 1870s and 188os what P.T. Barnum was to circuses: a master of bombast and promotional skills. His “United Mastodons” troupe, formed in 1877, brought together under one name four separate companies he’d been operating separately till then.

In 1888, Haverly’s Mastodons released a “souvenir songbook” of the numbers they were known for performing. Among them, a tune identified as “Irene, Goodnight!” A note indicated that this song was therein presented as sung by a Lew Randall. Not much seems to be known about Randall, other than that he was a “famous minstrel.” (The note at left, from the New York Clipper of August 30, 1890, associates him with a company called the Franklin & West Minstrels.)

Aside from its connection with Randall, according to Wolfe and Lornell, unnamed “historians” have identified the original “Irene, Good Night” (as it was called) to have been written by two men — the lyrics by a Gussie Lord Davis (image at right), the music by a George Propheter. Davis, who was black, seems to have been the prolific genius of the pair, credited with writing hundreds of extremely popular songs in his 26-year life span; nearly all of them (“Irene” an obvious exception) played to the racial stereotypes which the minstrel circuit relied on. You can find sheet music for several of them (“Irene,” alas, again excepted) at the Library of Congress’s online collection.

As for Propheter, who was white, he brought to the partnership connections with a New York music publisher. (His name, however, does appear jointly with Davis’s as the co-writer of many of the latter’s songs. (The more things change…) I haven’t seen any photos of Propheter; make of that what you will.)

To my knowledge, the sheet music — let alone a recording — exists nowhere on the Internet for Gussie Davis’s and George Propheter’s version of our subject. However, one online source has transcribed its lyrics from Volume 19 of a contemporary series of books called Wehman’s Universal Songster. At least, then, your patience is rewarded at last, with the words of the original “Goodnight, Irene” (again, identified therein as “Irene, Good Night”).

Irene, good-night, think love of me, my pretty Irene,
Good-night, good-night, Irene, oh, precious one!

Irene, good-night, keep me always in thy dreaming.
Think, love, of me when the night closes day with its twilight;
Irene, good-night, softly the moonlight is gleaming.
Would I ne’er could leave thee, my pretty Irene, good-night!

I’ll count the moments and the hours they pass so slowly by.
Until I see your sunny smiles and gaze into your eyes;
Oh, let me hear thy tender voice, I so oft heard before,
Irene, good-night, oh, precious one, oh, lov’d one I adore!

Irene, good-night, keep me always in thy dreaming.
Think, love, of me when the night closes day with its twilight;
Irene, good-night, softly the moonlight is gleaming,
Would I ue’er could leave thee, my pretty Irene, good-night!

Irene, good-night, think, love of me, my pretty Irene, goodnight.
Good-night, Irene, oh, precious one, good-night, good-night!

We don’t know the tune of this song, although various sources say that it (like the modern “Irene”) was technically a waltz.

As for the words, though — so… so very flowery, eh? So… yes, so nineteenth-century. And whoever might have been Gussie Davis’s Irene, it feels strangely satisfying to know that the singer loved her, unabashedly — and that no liquor or morphine was involved!

[Part 3 of this series deal with the post-Lead Belly years of “Goodnight, Irene”: more recent cover versions.]

___________________

* As you can see if you follow that link to The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, Wolfe and Lornell also connect the song (per Ledbetter family folklore) to Huddie’s niece Irene Campbell. However, that passage makes it pretty obvious (well, to me) that the lyric pre-dated the niece: her mother “announc[ed] that she would not have a child ‘named for a reel.'”

Note (added 2015-03-07): The Lomaxes are very important to the history of folk music in the United States — critically so. But it doesn’t do to trust them too much, either, especially old John A.: a product of a much more genteel environment than most of the musicians he helped popularize.

In particular, as it happens, hearing “I’ll get you in my dreams” has nothing to do with my inexact sense of hearing: that’s the word in Lead Belly’s original. See, for example, this page in Dennis Ford’s Miles of Thoughts (2012) — which pretty much sums up the case.