What’s in a Song: “Goodnight, Irene” (3)

[Image: snippet of “Goodnight, Irene” sheet music as commonly appearing around the Web. Yeah, John E. Lomax, co-author: like, Sorry about that, Huddie — you were a great chauffeur!]

My two earlier posts on this song (parts 1 and 2) packaged up, in short form, what I could learn of its early history. In this final installment, I thought I’d dwell on a few of the many versions of “Goodnight, Irene” recorded since Lead Belly first delivered it to John A. and Alan Lomax in the 1930s.

First up: let’s hear from Lead Belly himself.

As much as any song did, “Goodnight, Irene” (or as he first referred to it, simply “Irene”) became Lead Belly’s signature song. He never made much money from it — in fact, the Lomaxes were named as “co-authors” of the song at first, and as a result probably made more from it than Lead Belly himself. (He died in 1949 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more or less flat broke.) Nor did it become much of a “hit” in any version he recorded; I have no way of knowing for sure, but at a guess I’d say that the rawness of his performance style never had a chance of joining the Hit Parade.

After his final release from prison — the Lomax legend says it was thanks to their intervention with the authorities, almost certainly overstating their influence — Lead Belly went to work as a chauffeur for them. This gave him a chance to see much more of the wider world than he probably could have found on his own. Poet E.M. Schorb paints a good quick picture of this phase of Lead Belly’s life, in this excerpt from his poem titled “Leadbelly”:

Even the Lomax bros, even them white boys,
they know Irene—you driving them through
New York traffic, them folkloring in back and you
being their folkloring black chauffeur.
You drink sharp liquor in Harlem, play
with Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie
McGhee, the Headline Singers—radio too,
Hollywood and Three Songs by Leadbelly,
a French tour…

(Note: Schorb’s reference to the Lomax brothers isn’t 100% correct, since John A. Lomax was Alan’s father; to my knowledge, Leadbelly never chauffeured for John Jr. and Alan.)

As the poem indicates, among the performers he got to meet, befriend, and record with was the great blind blues harmonicist Sonny Terry. However, the 1943 version of “Irene” credited to the two of them together doesn’t — to my ear — feature Terry at all. (The album on which the song appeared did include Terry’s obvious contributions, and mentioned his name in the title; I’m guessing that’s the only reason his name is on this specific recording.)

—

This three-part series began with a memory of the folk-singing troupe The Weavers, and we’ll visit with them next.

The Weavers had been around for a few years, playing in New York City folk clubs and such, when they were “discovered” by a bandleader, songwriter, and what-have-you named Gordon Jenkins. In 1949, he was musical director at Decca Records, and saw in The Weavers an opportunity to take the label in new directions. Not only did he sign them as Decca artists; he also took responsibility for their arrangements, and for conducting the orchestra — strings! woodwinds! — with which he backed their recordings.

Their 1950 recording of “Goodnight, Irene,” with “words and music by Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax,” was almost stupefyingly successful. (One source — I can’t recall where I read this — referred to it as something like “one of the biggest hits of the first half of the century.” I don’t know the basis for this claim. But I do know that The Weavers’ rendition was Billboard’s #1 song for 1950.)

Because Lead Belly had died the previous year, we have no idea what he might have made of this rendition — but it’s almost unrecognizable. Superficially, of course, it’s got the violins keening throughout, and it features not only a male but a female soloist. And the lyrics, oh my: how… how… how nice, how polite and how very sanitary, hmm? True, they retain that reference to jumping in the river to drown. But also perhaps a little telling, that they turn it over to the woman to sing that verse!

Don’t get me wrong: I really, really like The Weavers’ version. It is, after all, the version which — although I’d heard only the last chorus — first drew my attention to the song, and the version which would make me seek out its history thirty years later. But it’s a completely different song from Lead Belly’s, the urban or suburban “downtown” of the later one far, far removed from the rundown, peeling-paint-and-clapboard “downtown” of the earlier: the post-Depression country blues passing through some sort of magic portal of history, geography, and culture to become stern post-War moralism. “Go home to your wife and family,” indeed!

—

The year in which The Weavers released “Goodnight, Irene” — 1950 — was the song’s annus mirabilis. Of course, their version was a mighty steamroller of a recording, more or less dwarfing the at least seven other versions which came out later the same year — which is not to say that none of the others were of little interest.

That period of time was not exactly the highlight of Frank Sinatra’s career. He’d peaked in the ’30s and ’40s. Even the photo of him which appeared in Metronome Magazine that year (at left) seemed to tell the tale: he looks boyish and cocky, at least self-assured, still on top of the world… but his jacket threatens to blend in and fade away against the backdrop.

He apparently felt more than a bit uneasy about his place, too, and it was showing even in media reports. This one comes from Elijah Wald’s 2011 book, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll:

By 1950 his career was in trouble, so he was obeying [producers’] orders… and when he mentioned the Lead Belly song in a backstage interview, his discomfort was evident: “We’ve got a new one that’s moving pretty good called, you’ll excuse the expression, ‘Goodnight Irene.'”

The interviewer, clearly startled, responded, “Hey, that’s a nice tune.”

“You wanna bet?” Sinatra snapped, then paused and added, “Naw, it’s really cute.” But when the interviewer suggested that he should do more songs like it, his response was, “Don’t hold your breath.”

In his recording — which actually became the biggest hit of this low spot — Sinatra was rather less dismissive. It’s a fairly straight-up cover of The Weavers’, set against a not-quite-so-florid (but still rather heavy-handed) backdrop provided by Mitch Miller’s singers.

Funny, that little wording change — substituting the first-person pronoun for The Weavers’ references to “you”: subtly altering the sense from an admonition to a resolution… especially a resolution not particularly convincing once Sinatra moved into his Rat Pack era, hmm?

—

As pop music shifted gears into the middle twentieth century and beyond, “Irene, Goodnight” was not left behind. It was a favorite of Jerry Garcia’s, for example; Oliver Trager’s The American Book of the Dead reports that Garcia recorded it “more than forty times sans [Grateful] Dead between 1976 and 1988.”

In the 1986 live performance shown here, Garcia and his frequent collaborator Jon Kahn (on the double bass here, rather than bass guitar) turned “Irene” into something which neither Lead Belly nor The Weavers might have recognized. Oh, those are the latter’s words (more or less). But the song as presented here is more in Garcia’s boogie-blues vein than anything raw on the one hand, or sweet on the other.

—

Ry Cooder has always been a respectful handler of older — especially cross-cultural — music, and his take on “Goodnight Irene” (which closed his 1976 album Chicken Skin Music) proved to be no exception. In it, he blended Lead Belly’s original chorus — promising to “get you in my dreams” — and the verse about suicide by overdose, balancing them with The Weavers’ cautionary verse about settling down “by the fireside bright” with your family.

But he added another flourish, an opening verse which lends a bit of bitter back story to the tale of Irene and the narrator. This verse was not original with Cooder, but a version of one cited by Pete Seeger (ironically one of the original Weavers) and other sources:

I asked your mother for you
She told me that you was too young
I wish dear Lord never have seen your face
And I’m sorry that you ever been born.

In other versions of this verse, the last two lines amp up the bitterness (and blame-shifting) even further: “I wish to the Lord I’d never seen your face / or heard your lying tongue.”

The video below comes from a 1977 appearance (complete with what he called “The Chicken Skin Band,” including an accordionist) on a British TV show:

(“Chicken skin,” by the way, is supposedly a Hawaiian colloquialism for what are more commonly called “goosebumps” or — down here in the US South — “chill bumps.”)

—

One of the open questions I had when I started looking at cover version of “Goodnight Irene” was: What do women think of this raggedy, rather misogynistic song?

The short answer, unsurprisingly, seems to be: not much. One of my favorite resources for discovering alternative performances of songs is called SecondhandSongs; they list seventy-some over one hundred fifty (!) “Irene” covers… almost none by women.

Well, none of those covers were quite what I’d hoped to find — something respectful but also, y’know, something with a bit of early-21st-century knowingness to it.

So I looked around a little more, and stumbled on a group called Juice Vocal Ensemble (or sometimes simply Juice): “at the forefront,” says their site, “of the UK’s experimental/classical scene, performing new vocal music which draws on classical, world music, jazz, folk, pop, improvisation and theatre.”

Juice’s take on “Irene” is an a-capella, raising-hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck dirge (more chicken-skin music, hmm?). The version of the lyrics they use (on their September 2014 album Laid Bare: Love Songs) most resembles Ry Cooder’s, although they substitute kiss for get: in this recording alone, I haven’t heard a whiff of false “niceness” in that substitution. And they restore to the complete song another final verse which appears in some other performers’ versions:

You cause me to weep, you cause me to mourn
You cause me to leave my home
But the very last words I heard you sing
were “Please give me one more song”

I’m so happy to wrap up this collection of “Irene” covers with such a sweet, haunting version: I bet it mists over the eyes of even Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s ghost!