If you’re a music history enthusiast, hours of fun can be had perusing the Roud Folk Song Index (https://archives.vwml.org/search/roud), the online database of around a quarter of a million references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world, and named after its compiler Steve Roud. It correlates versions of traditional folk song lyrics independently documented over past centuries by many different collectors across the UK and North America. Take Roud number 6393, for instance: The House of the Rising Sun.
Although widely known from the most successful contemporary version, recorded by the Animals in 1964, The House of the Rising Sun is a traditional folk song with deep roots: it was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, but probably goes back much further, emanating from the tradition of so-called “broadside ballads”. A “broadside” was a sheet of cheap paper used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries to distribute news and so on, but also, most popularly, ballads. “Ballads” were narrative rhymes and songs developing from the minstrelsy of the earlier fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which told folk stories on every topic under the sun, from legends and heroes and religion to the more prosaic side of life.
The House of the Rising Sun ballad tells of a person’s life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans, and is a classic cautionary tale, appealing to his listeners to avoid the same fate:
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one
Folk song collector Alan Lomax noted that “Rising Sun” was the name of a bawdy house in at least two traditional English songs, and a name for English pubs (Leeds dwellers may be familiar with the one on Kirkstall Road, albeit now sadly disused). He hypothesised that the location of the said drinking hole-cum-brothel was then simply relocated from England to the US by roaming performers. In 1953, Lomax met Harry Cox, an English farm labourer known for his impressive folk song repertoire, who knew a song called She was a Rum One (Roud 2128) with two possible opening verses, one beginning:
If you go to Lowestoft, and ask for The Rising Sun,
There you’ll find two old whores and my old woman is one.
The oldest known recording of the song, under the title Rising Sun Blues, is by Appalachian artists Tom Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it in 1933. Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather who had got married around the time of the Civil War, suggesting that the song was written years before the turn of the century.
In 1941, Woody Guthrie recorded a version; Lead Belly recorded two versions in the forties; Joan Baez recorded it in 1960 on her eponymous debut album; Nina Simone recorded a version for the live album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962; and Bob Dylan recorded the song for his debut album, released in March 1962. But it was the Animals, Newcastle’s own blues-rock band made up of Eric Burdon, Alan Price, Chas Chandler, Hilton Valentine and John Steel, who scored a transatlantic number one hit single with it in 1964 and made it their signature tune.
