No one is sure who first sang the song that is now known as House Of The Rising Sun but it goes back, as far as anyone can tell, to 1933 and probably years before that; sung by miners or whores or those who just were trying to earn a few bucks while working on a medicine show. At least that was the case of Clarence “Tom” Ashley who was the first one to record the song, alongside Doc Watson. Ashley claims his grandfather had taught him the song and it was one he performed often throughout Southern Appalachia in between black face comedy shows.
Four years went by and nothing much came of the song and it would have probably been forgotten, or left to the saloons and brothels, if it weren’t the chance meeting of Alan Lomax and Georgia Turner. Lomax, an American Folklorist, was working for the Library of Congress and his sole purpose was to find and document songs from the South. He had overhead the barely sixteen year old Georgia Turner singing a song she called “Risin’ Sun Blues” and they recorded it together.
This eventually lead to the song being covered by plenty of other folk artists— most notably Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.
Perhaps the most recognizable version was recorded by Eric Burdon and The Animals in 1964. Eric Burdon later claimed to have heard the song in a night club performed by British Folk Star, Johnny Handle and decided, while touring with Chuck Berry, to play the song which they had arranged to have a more rock n roll vibe and to fit the deep baritone voice of their lead singer.
This version was groundbreaking in two ways: first, the song’s length was a little over four minutes, something unheard of at the time of the two-minute-long-hits that controlled the radio waves, and secondly, the lyrics were shifted from being about a prostitute to being about a gambler, some say to make it more radio friendly, and suddenly the song found a much larger audience.
It was such a hit that whenever Bob Dylan tried to play his rendition during a live set he was often asked if he learned the song from The Animals and for years it was considered, without much argument, that Eric Burdon wrote the song.
There were many other covers from Joan Baez to Waylon Jennings to Frijed Pink to Muse.
The lyrics are always different, it is sometimes told through a prospective of a whore, a gambler or even a junkie and it is either directed at the narrator’s mother, father, brother or sister but the feeling of regret and the need for redemption is always there. And maybe that is the reason why this particular song will never grow old, no matter how many covers are out there.
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