Weekend Music Break: Eric Bibb and Jean-Jacques Milteau: “Good Night Irene”

My quest continues to clean up older music-related posts here whose little audio-player plugins are outdated (and hence won’t play in some browsers). This led me to a favorite series, called “What’s in a Song” — in particular, to a four-year-old, three-part post (published over a two-week period… you’re keeping all these numbers straight, right?) on Huddie Ledbetter’s classic, “Goodnight, Irene”:

	Description
Part 1	The Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”) story
Part 2	Precursors to Lead Belly’s “original” version
Part 3	Covers of the song by some later artists

In that last installment, I referred to the Secondhand Songs site — a database, essentially, listing cover versions of a given song. At the time of the original post, a little over 70 covers of “Goodnight Irene” were included; as of today, it lists over 150. (No grass growing under the song’s feet, for sure — nor under Secondhand Songs‘s feet. for that matter.)

This led me, of course, to wonder about the remakes I might’ve missed, for one reason, on my earlier visit. That’s when I stumbled on this, from 2015; I recommend it to you not only for the song itself, and for the lead performer, but for his sideman: blues harmonicist Jean-Jacques Milteau. I have a feeling M. Milteau has found his way into my rotation of most listened-to instrumentalists.

(If by some chance you’re really an oldtimer here at RAMH, you may recall Eric Bibb’s name from an even earlier post — back when the site toddled around the Internet as a mere two-year-old. His “Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down,” featured there and in several playlists since, continues to be for me a solid Keep your chin up, damn it anthem for life in the early 21st century — certainly in the USA, anyhow!)