I’ve known “House of the Rising Sun” forever, in many different versions. I don’t know which I heard first; maybe the Animals version, which was a number one hit in 1964, when I was five years old, but if so it would only have been as background music, or coming from the window of a passing car. I’m more aware of hearing it from Josh White, Lead Belly, and probably a bit later from Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, as well as from lots of people who sang it all over the place, mostly having learned it from the Animals.

I also heard it from Woody Guthrie, whose version was quite different, and my video is descended from Woody’s. I know the Josh White/Van Ronk/Dylan/Animals version, of course. Dave said he got it from Hally Wood, who got it from Alan Lomax, but my sense is that he was more influenced by White, who was a major early influence on him, and who also got it from Lomax. 

I’m emphasizing that because Lomax recorded three versions of the song in eastern Kentucky in 1937, all from white singers, and the only previous recording was made in 1933 by Clarence “Tom” Ashley, a white musician from eastern Tennessee. There was one earlier text, sent to Robert Winslow Gordon for his “Songs Men Sing” page in Adventure magazine, and likewise heard from a white singer. But Lomax was convinced that it was originally from Black tradition and confirmed that assumption to his own satisfaction by asking older New Orleans jazz players about it, though as best I can tell, the confirmation was just a couple of them responding that it sounded familiar. So, considering it a Black blues song, he taught it to Lead Belly and Josh White, and it descended from them to Van Ronk, Dylan, Eric Burdon, and a few million other people who sing it as a blues song from New Orleans.

That was how I originally thought of it, as well, and when I occasionally sang it, I sang the Dylan/Van Ronk/Burdon version. But when I was writing Jelly Roll Blues and delving into its history, it struck me that all the early sources were white singers in the southern mountain region and there is no reason to think the song isn’t from that region and culture. New Orleans was the mythic capital of sin for the entire South, so it makes sense that a singer from that region would make it the site of a young woman or man “going astray,” and the protagonist is not someone from there; s/he’s someone who went wrong there and is going back there.

There’s lots more to be said about the song — for example, that there were also “unprintable” versions circulating in the southern mountains, giving more explicit descriptions of the house. I’ve written about all of that in my book, with some of those verses. (“There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun/And when you want your pecker spoilt, that’s where you get it done.” Or the milder, “Beware the red light out in front an’ the pictures on the wall,/ An’ yellow gals dressed in purple shoes, without no clothes at all.”) I’ve also published a long story about the Van Ronk/Dylan/Animals version in Dave’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, including Dave’s suggestion that the “house” was actually the women’s prison in New Orleans, rather than a house of prostitution.

But what’s relevant for the purposes of this blog is that I didn’t see any point in recording one more version descended from the Van Ronk/Animals arrangement, so I went back to Woody Guthrie’s, as best I remember it. That means the lyrics are somewhat different, but the main difference is the accompaniment. I don’t play any minor chords and the guitar part is a lot faster than the vocal, a style I think was inherited from banjo players. The homemade banjos people played back in the hills had virtually no sustain, so had to be picked pretty fast, and southern mountain ballad singers came up with the solution of picking fast, dance-style rhythms even when they accompanied slow ballads. It’s a weird idea, and there was no particular reason to keep playing that way once folks had guitars, but by then it was a tradition, and it has the advantage of balancing a doleful vocal with some musical energy.

Perhaps more to the point, for my purposes, it has the advantage of not sounding like the Animals’ version. I have nothing against that version, except that I’ve heard it so many times that I never need to hear it again — and, having played it many times as a request in my European busking days, am very, very tired of it. Whereas this version feels kind of fresh and interesting to me. No matter how far I wander in my musical life, I keep going back to Woody, and it’s always a pleasure.

(I should note that there was a significant series of recordings of the song by women before Van Ronk or Dylan did it; Hally Wood recorded it in 1953, adapting Georgia Turner’s version; Judy Collins did it on her first recording, a 1959 album of performers at the Exodus gallery and coffee house in Denver; and Joan Baez recorded it on her first album in 1960. Josh White, as well, seems to have first learned it when he was accompanying the Broadway singer Libby Holman in the early 1940s [a partnership nurtured by Alan Lomax], and his son, Josh Jr., said that although he performed it for the rest of his career, he always thought of it as a woman’s song and felt kind of weird about doing it.)

(I should also add that Clarence Ashley’s original recording was issued as “Rising Sun Blues,” so Lomax wasn’t the only person who placed it in a blues tradition — but I’d suggest it was more a blues in the sense of feeling blue than in the sense of being from African American sources.)