Alan Lomax

[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?

[Read more…]

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…

[Read more…]

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

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