11 May 2020. Goodnight Irene.
Could be a devotional painting from the French Renaissance--a troubador figure recast as St. John the Baptist, but no, we're at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, tbe year is 1987, and it's Ry Cooder and his Moula Band. The button-box is Flaco Jimenez, of course--I'd forgotten--adding his norteño harmonies after each verse. The song--Goodnight, Irene, and they're in it for the long haul--including back up singers (the appealing guy with widely-spaced front teeth), a tinkly keyboard (well, the song was originally tin-pan alley) and even a horn section (okay, saxophone and trombone) but the effect is perfect--and their extended rendition (something like 8:27) filmed and edited by Les Blank, is a classic. Maybe most of all because of how Ry Cooder sings it--reinventing the phrases we've all heard a million times, and giving them his own beautiful immediacy...
Down to the scraggly white tee-shirt, an East Hollywood touch--and he looks like a child, but he's been at this for more than 20 years. The solos flow from one player to the next--Ry Cooder's orchestrating--and the audience is there at each turn--each note even, knowing that the evening is drawing to a close--more than that, really, an entire epoch, and you have to celebrate--be grateful, that is--for each moment as it comes...
There was debate about this when I suggested the song for the 6 o'clock get togethers on Miramar. In fact I already knew what was coming. How did Tanya put it in her email, "I picked the least depressing..." which is, I suppose, one way to look at the matter--but the beautiful thing about folksongs--and about Goodnight Irene in particular--is how they don't edit out. Everything's there--drugs, alcohol, threats and murder--along with love, dream kisses and longing. How not? There were no psycho-therapists in Mooringsport, Louisiana--Leadbelly's hometown--just poverty and black folks--until the discovery of East Texas oil suddenly opened everything up. Exploded. Probably brought the minstrel shows where Leadbelly (or another Ledbetter brother) first heard it--Irene Goodnight, written by Gussie Lord Davis, a black songster on Tin Pan Alley in 1886...
You can follow all these traces--always fascinating, the idea that everything has a point of origin--but in fact it's the music that counts--each time you pick up the guitar and gather everyone in a circle at the end of the evening--something magical in how each person present realizes that we're all there together again, voices lifted, even if it may be for the very last time...
"Please sing me one more song..."
