Goodnight Irene

What a grand day it has been.  I've not spent much money.  I've had a lovely amount of fresh air and I have rounded off the night with some recording.

Lets work backwards and start with the recording.  "Goodnight Irene" first came to the attention of punters on this side of the pond from Leadbelly records.  I don't know if Leadbelly wrote the song or not but any number of people have recorded it.  This recording is simply the latest.

The first time I heard the song was by Scottish Dance Band Pianist and Band Leader Jim Macleod.

Jim Macleod led the band at the Dunblane Hydro for many years and was also featured on music shows on the Television. "Goodnight Irene" was kind of his signature tune on the TV. It opened or closed the show (this is a memory from forty five years ago or so).

Lots of other good versions have influenced my reading of the song as well.  Ry Cooder's version with Flaco Jimenez was a great arrangement.  Ry kept the simplicity of the melody and added a beautiful arrangement.  So I lifted Ry Cooder's version of the words and Jim Macleods version of the melody, stuck them together and made it my version.

I sometimes play with Aberdeen accordion player leader Charlie Abel in his band Iron Broo.  Charlie also does a more Scottish version of the song than Jim Macleod or I.  The story in the song differs a wee bit as well, but the basis is there.  Not actually mentioning Irene by name, it might be an ancestor of Leadbelly's work.

My version is about a guy who develops an obsessive interest in a younger woman by the name of Irene, with whom he "rambles, gambles and stays out all night long".

One can assume this has not always been a happy setup, as in the first verse the protagonist of the song expresses the wish that Irene had "never been born". Like all good songs all this is alluded to and not spelt out.  There is a wonderful story to be constructed by the listener form the bare bones of the song.

Clearly Leadbelly's original audience in Shreveport brothels and Texas prisons would have spun a very different narrative around the song than the blue rinsed ladies who lapped up Jim Macleod at the Dunblane Hydro.

Leadbelly had a long and passionate relationship with a woman who worked in a brothel. Obsessive love seldom has a happy ending and so it was for Leadbelly and the original Irene apparently.

It is a wonderful song and one that has spoken to me for more than forty years.

Earlier today I drove up Glen Esk and parked at Invermark beside the beautifully plain church with its charming pedal organ.  I intend to write a piece of music for that pedal organ sometime.  A site-specific piece.

Passing by the church today, I didn't cross over the Water of Mark but turned right on the path to Mount Keen and the Queen's Well.

The sun shone and Mount Keen, the most easterly Munro rose in the distance.  I last climbed it many years ago in the company of my friend Jennifer.  Probably in 1987.   That is many lifetimes ago now.  Fully twenty five years and more.

That time was cloudy and rainy.  We didn't hinder and made good time all the way up to the top of the hill. And back down again. I don't recall us stopping at the Queen's Well that time as it is about a hundred yards or so off the track and that might well have been the limit of visibility that day.

Today though, the Queen's Well was my destination.  It is a wonderfully incongruous piece of Victorian brown-nosing.

On one of  her treks through the hills the young Queen Victoria stopped and drank from the well on this spot.

The local landowner must have been thinking here was a fine way to ingratiate himself at court and ordered the building of a crown shaped granite edifice over the well.  So here it stands.  Nearly at the foot of the Ladder path.

As well as striking off the path to climb Mount Keen the traveller can carry on over to Glen Tanar and Aboyne.

In the midst of all this grandeur sits a monument to sycophancy and sucking up to power.  I've never had it in me to curry favour with anyone.  I hope I never do.