Here are the background notes from The Folk Songs of North America (Alan Lomax, 1960)

THE ARCHIVE of American Folk Song, which now numbers some 60,000 songs in its files of field recordings, came into actual being one broiling summer day in the State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana. The first recording we took on our new portable equipment was of the state's prisoner, Lead Belly, singing Irene Goodnight.

We were powerfully impressed by his panther-like grace and his extraordinary good looks: his already snow-white hair set off the aquiline features and the proudly gazing eyes inherited from his African and Cherokee Indian ancestors. We were amazed by his mastery of his great, green-painted twelve-string guitar, but we were deeply moved by the flawless tenor voice which rang out across the green cotton fields like a big sweet-toned trumpet. We believed Lead Belly when he said, "I'ze the king of all the twelve-string guitar players of the world."

My father and I had come to the penitentiary hunting folk songs. In Lead Belly we found a great folk artist, who not only stamped the songs with his own strong personality, but at once involved us in his life. Before the recording session had ended, Lead Belly had what he wanted from us—the promise to ask the Governor of Louisiana to pardon this two-time murderer. We stopped off at Baton Rouge the next day and left a recording of Lead Belly's ballad appeal for a pardon in Governor O.K. Allen's office

I left my wife wringing her hands an' cryin',
Governor O.K. Allen, save this man of mine.

Had you, Gov. O.K. Allen, like you got me,
I'd wake up in the morning, and set you free

Whether because of this song or for another reason, Lead Belly was paroled to my father a year later, and joined him on a long tour through the Southern prisons, where Lead Belly's performances for the convicts demonstrated just the kind of songs we wanted to record. At the Christmas meeting of the Modern Language Association, Lead Belly sang at the final smoker and drew an ovation from an audience of two thousand staid college professors. Newspaper and magazine stories led to a series of concert engagements where, despite the fact that few of his listeners could understand his Louisiana dialect, Lead Belly triumphed again and again with his brilliant performances. His wedding was filmed for the March of Time and covered by the New York Press.

In the years that followed Lead Belly recorded his songs for a number of companies, though never so beautifully as he had first sung them for us in Louisiana; his voice grew thinner and harder in the smoke and tension of New York City yet, even in his late recordings, he sang with so much force and with such great style that he has become the model for hundreds of young folk singers in Britain and the U.S.A. Everywhere he performed, he sang Irene, his most beloved song. Instinctively, he must have guessed that one day it would be a hit, and so it happened.

Death came to him slowly and painfully in the form of a creeping paralytic disease, that stilled his sinewy limbs one after another, like an army cautiously besieging and capturing some great fortification. He had been unable to sing for many months, before he finally told his wife, Martha Promise Ledbetter, goodbye on the night of December 6, 1949.

Six months later, Irene Goodnight became the hit of the year and sold about two million records. It was translated into every European language and has become a folk song in a dozen countries. Today, the songs of this violent, talented man, whom life had tempered to a steely hardness; are sung by an ever-widening circle of people round the world; and it looks very much as if this Louisiana farm-labourer and convict will emerge as one of the important musical figures of the twentieth century.