Presumably, the story that Leadbelly wrote Goodnight Irene has been well scotched early on in this thread. I would like to add though, in case nobody else has, that Leadbelly claimed he learned it from his uncle Bob Ledbetter. There's a recording of Bob Ledbetter singing Irene on the Flyright Lp of Library of Congress Recordings; Jerry's Saloon Bar Blues; FLY LP 260.

What I wanted to say though was that a couple of weeks ago, one of the musicians at a jazz session I go to introduced Irene by saying "Here's a song Leadbelly wrote. He wrote it about his first wife, who was called Irene, before he murdered her. He had four wives altogether and he murdered them all. And the lyrics which Leadbelly sang were very coarse. A lot coarser than the version we're going to perform."

I attempted to disabuse him in the interval by telling him that Leadbelly was only married twice; that he only committed one murder; that neither of his wives was called Irene, and he never did either of them in; that he never wrote Irene; and that the words he sang were pretty much what everybody else sang, give or take a 'get' instead of a 'see'.

Okay, he admitted he'd exaggerated the rest, but he was adamant that Leadbelly was the composer. The following week I came back armed with an extract from Wikipedia (having checked its assertions against the Lornell/Wolfe biography).

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet", he said.

Last night, apropos of nothing, he said to the audience "I was looking on the Internet today, and I discovered that John Wayne was only 5'6" and he used to ride a shetland pony when filming to make himself look taller".

Well, what would you have heckled him with?