Has there ever been a weirder folk song than "Goodnight Irene"? I have been listening to the original Angola Penitentiary tapes of Lead Belly from 1933, with its two versions of "Irene". It has been noted that some kind of the song had been wandering around (a minstrel version is reported from the late 1880's), but Lead Belly obviously made it his own, and eventually (just after his death) the Weavers catapulted his version into fame. It is a dark, hard song -- suicide, morphine, underage sex, broken homes in the verses -- but with that chorus that everyone knows with that lilt in it, and that, over time, infiltrated the rest of the song. In Lead Belly's version(s) from 1933, the verses are woven into the kind of story a man convicted of multiple assaults and spending time in Angola would tell, and there is always that big, booming, hard guitar work, like a man pounding rocks, and dealing with the bitterness of remembering how he messed up with a woman who stands with her hands on her hips and tells him to get lost, that she has finally given up on him. Who is this Irene? What kind of griefs has she had to go through with this hard, messed up man?

Contrast this with the Weavers, 1955 in Carnegie Hall, where the song is like a barbershop singalong. Not to take anything away from the Weavers, whom I revere, but the transformation in the song is stunning: it sways and sweetens, and everyone is there for a good time. But the verses still sing of a wreck of a life, a failed marriage, and wandering the streets, while the chorus swells into dreamland.

Of course, without the barbershopping, "Goodnight Irene" would never have become a huge hit -- but it is still a strange thing, to listen to the dark bitter suicidal seed, and the transformation into the sentimental flower that I remember from sitting around a hundred junior campfires.