Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter carried the weight of the American songster tradition on a battered twelve-string, moving between prison work songs, cowboy ballads, blues and children's game-songs with equal command. Discovered by folklorists John and Alan Lomax while incarcerated in Louisiana, he became — through Library of Congress field recordings and a late-life move to New York's folk scene — the single most direct conduit between nineteenth-century Black vernacular music and the mid-twentieth-century folk and skiffle revivals. He never lived to see 'Goodnight, Irene' become a number-one hit for the Weavers in 1950, dying the year before.

the sound in question

1948

Goodnight, IreneLead Belly