Music: Good Night, Irene

“This here song,” the late Huddie (“Lead Belly”) Ledbetter used to explain, “was made about a man an’ a girl was walkin’ along one Sunday evenin’. Jus’ befo’ this girl an’ man got to de house, she said, ‘You ask my mother for me, when you get home.’ The man tol’ her, ‘All right’ . . . An’ he went back to de girl an’ she say, ‘What did mamma tell you?’ He looked at Irene—her name was Irene—an’ here what he said …” Then, his coal-black face gleaming fiercely and his horny hands scratching his twelve-string guitar, the murderous old Minstrel Lead Belly would sing:

I ask your mother for you,

She told me you was too young;

I wish to de Lawd I never seen your face,

I’m sorry you ever was aborn.

Irene, good night,

Irene, good night,

Good night, Irene, good night, Irene,

I’ll kiss you in my dreams.*

Old Lead Belly himself thought that he had learned Irene from his Uncle Terrell, just before he was sent to the penitentiary in Texas for murder in 1918. Adding verses as they came to him, Lead Belly made Irene a prison favorite. Five years after he got out of the Texas jail on a pardon, he bounced into Louisiana’s state prison farm for assault with intent to kill, and sweet Irene went right along with him.

In 1934, when Library of Congress Folklorist John Lomax recorded Lead Belly’s famed pardon petition,† he put Irene on the other side. Music-loving Governor 0. K. Allen is said to have pardoned the old reprobate as much for Irene as anything. Until Lead Belly died in Manhattan last year, he sang Irene as his theme song.

Last week the old minstrel’s old song, prettied up and cut in half, was in fifth place on the hit parade. A quartet called the Weavers, recording (for Decca) with Gordon Jenkins’ band, had used it as a filler to back Tzena, Tzena. Helped along by Jo Stafford, Frankie Sinatra, et al., the filler had just about caught up with third-place Tzena.

Missing in most new, dehydrated record versions was old Lead Belly’s closing verse, moaned by “de man,” Lead Belly used to explain, “wid his head hung down, cryin’ “:

I love Irene, God knows I do,

Love her till the sea runs dry;

An’ ef Irene turns her back on me,

I’m gonna take morphine an’ die.

Some other old tunes, many of them performed by oldtimers, were making popular record news last week. Among the best of them:

Comes Jazz (Columbia) includes such favorites as Shim Me Sha Wabble, That Da-Da Strain and At the Jazz Band Ball, torn off with good Dixieland sound by such alumni of Chicago’s North Side as Bud Freeman, Eddie Condon, Jack Teagarden and Pee Wee Russell.

I’ve Got the World on a String (Ella Fitzgerald; Decca). Not so poignant as Mildred Bailey’s classic recording, but even this one proves that the Harold Arlen song is still head & shoulders above most of today’s limp romantic ballads.

Tony Martin’s Dream Girls (RCA Victor). Most of the girls Tony Martin sings about in his butterscotch baritone (Rosalie, Diane, Sweet Sue, Ramona, etc.) have been around for a long time, but are still pleasant to hear about.

La Vie en Rose (Louis Armstrong; Decca). Satchmo goes continental with a gravel-voiced version of the Edith Piaf café favorite.

* Copyright 1950, Spencer Music Corp.

†[If I] had you, Gov’nor O. K. Allen,

Like you got me,

I would wake up in de mornin’,

Let you out on reprieve . . .