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OK, Probably best to start with a brief look at this song’s origins;
Basically, the song in its currently accepted form was first recorded by Alan Lomax in 1938, in a more or less complete version performed in Kentucky by a woman named Georgia Turner. It is inevitably noted however that the roots of the song are ‘much older’, and Lomax even hypothesised a connection with several venerable British folk tunes, the link coming from the melody and the use of the term “Rising Sun” in connection with prostitution.
Oddly, the history of the song’s subsequent adoption as a folk/blues/rock ‘standard’ seems to have been characterised by widespread confusion over its origin, with various singers simply crediting the song to the artists they first heard it from, with names stretching from Bukka White to Roy Acuff to Dolly Parton being thrown around, but I think the Lomax recording makes it pretty clear that this is essentially a public domain, ‘Trad.’ composition belonging to everyone and no-one.
Much of what the internet has to say on the origins of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is summarized on Wikipedia.
Bob Dylan’s rendition, from his self-titled album, is as definitive a version as any, and a good, stirring performance, so here’s a link: link!
And, for comparison’s sake, here’s the version made famous by the Animals; link!
The lyrics are pretty malleable, but in their most complete, original form go as follows (verse in brackets added from the Dylan version cos I think it’s cool);
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl
And me, Oh Lord, I’m one
My mother was a tailor,
She sewed them new blue jeans.
My lover he was a gambler, Oh Lord,
Down in New Orleans.
[He fills his glasses up to the brim
and he lays the cards around
and the only pleasure he gets out of life,
is rambling from town to town]
Now the only thing a gambling man needs
Is a suitcase and a trunk;
And the only time he's ever satisfied
Is when he's on a drunk.
If I only list'nd when my dear mother said:
Beware, my child, when you roam,
Keep away from drunkards and all those gambling men,
It's best by far to come home.
Go and tell my baby sister
Never do like I have done,
But to shun that house in New Orleans
That they call the Rising Sun
With one foot on the platform,
And one foot on the train
I'm goin' back to New Orleans
To wear that ball and chain.
I'm going back to New Orleans
My race is almost run;
I'm going back to spend the rest of my life
In the house of the Rising Sun
Many versions – most notably the one by the Animals – reverse the gender of the protagonist, singing “..many a poor boy” or “young man” in the first verse and switching the “sweetheart” for a father etc.
The tune, should anyone feel like bangin’ it out, is a constant rolling rhythm repeating over the course of each verse, the chords going more or less as follows;
FIRST LINE: Am > C > D > F
SECOND LINE: Am > C > E > E
THIRD LINE: Am > C > D > F
FOURTH LINE: Am > E > Am
Now, some reflections;
[Some of what follows is repeated from a post on my weblog, so apologies to anyone who has read it before.]
Along with early Beach Boys and Beatles hits, and the Eagles ‘Hotel California’, the Animals version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is one of the first songs I can remember really getting into when I was growing up.
It could have been the slow and menacing tune – pretty unique on the ‘60s nostalgia pop airwaves – and the bluesy intensity of the performance that initially made my young self sit up and take notice, but probably the main reason is that, then as now, I love a song that tells a good story, or at least has interesting lyrics from which you can build a story, and ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is a prime example.
When I first listened to it, I was too young to understand what the song was about, and the mystery of it had me completely transfixed – what could possibly be going on in this house that was so terrible it drove young men to sin and madness? What strange power drew them to it? Whatever it was, it was clearly so awful that instead of elaborating upon it, the singer decides instead to tell us about what his parents do for a living in a tone of equally passionate dread, suggesting that the evil of The House has forever affected his outlook on everyday life. (Presumably the social status implications of being the son of a tailor and a gambler were also lost on me as a child.) My obvious conclusion – well it must be a haunted house, full of unspeakable ghosts and horrors. The young men must dare each other to go in, and emerge as hopeless wrecks, their lives ruined by the stark, screaming terror they had witnessed within.
Man, that organ solo used to chill me to the very bone!
As you can imagine, realising a few years later that it’s actually just about a brothel or something was a huge disappointment. But it’s still an absolutely astonishing song, a classic of the first water. It’s one of those songs like ‘Hey Joe’ or ‘Louis Louis’ that’s sufficiently simple for anybody to pick up, play and remember, and malleable enough for them to concoct their own personal variations on it, without ever losing sight of it’s essential power.
Different emphasis can be put on it to hint at issues of race, gender, poverty or just the good ol’ religious good/evil, salvation/damnation angle, not forgetting the inescapable aura of vague, nameless dread that so captured my childhood imagination. And just like with the slightly older canon of folk and roots music, listening to the different versions and copping the bits you like isn’t so much stealing as adapting the material to hand to construct your own ‘perfect’ version.
But the key point about the song I think is the power of INSINUATION. To any adult listener, it will be obvious that the song is about prostitution, and the inescapable cycle of exploitation and misery caused by poverty and the lowly economic/social status of women, yet these things are NEVER directly mentioned in the lyrics, and this leads me to wonder;
Why are they never mentioned?
And, perhaps more importantly, why do we nevertheless immediately make the connection?
Why couldn’t the song actually be about, like, something else?
The power of insinuation is of course nothing new in American roots music. I mean, let’s face it, the delta blues singers wouldn’t have become such universal touchstones if their songs were solely concerned with getting up in the morning or going for a walk or eating shrimp or any of the other ostensibly mindless stuff that a face value reading of a lot of their lyrics would tend to suggest. The power of the music comes from the emotion invested in the voice and performance, and from reading between the lines and connecting it with what we know of the social and economic circumstances under which it was produced.
I think ‘House of the Rising Sun’ can be seen as a particularly subtle and highly developed example of this process, drawing an astonishing range of implications and associations from a quite guarded set of carefully chosen lyrics. Check for example the sublime way in which it sets up a clear duality between a virtuous life of family, honesty, hard work and the sinful path of drinking, rambling, gambling and bad men, without ever slipping fully in a religious set-up and getting dull and preachy on our asses, as do so many folk songs. Yet it still manages to imbue the path of sin with an aura of such nameless fear that I can imagine it making more converts to the righteous life than any number of kitschy, self-righteous “They’ve Got the Church Out-Numbered” style singalongs.
And, as so often in the blues, it’s very easy to see the rather nebulous notion of ‘sin’ as acting as a smokescreen for an emotional and heartfelt criticism of the rather more solid realities of Southern American life which led poor, presumably black, young women toward lives of such trouble and hardship – a criticism which social convention and a fear of radicalism might have rendered unthinkable if expressed in more direct terms and without the veneer of religious morality.
Another thing worthy of discussion is the wide variety of different meanings that can be placed on the song with scarcely any change of note or lyric ;
Leadbelly, the Animals and subsequent rock versions have all tended to emphasize the macho elements of the song, switching it to a male perspective and gleefully confessing to the catalogue of drinkin’, gamblin’ and vice, maintaining the doomed, fearful tone, but imbuing it with a rebellious, faintly nihilistic air that’s perfectly in tune with the outsider doctrines of Rock n’ Roll.
And at the other end of the scale, a stark, stripped down version of the same song performed by a soulful female singer (Joan Baez and Marianne Faithfull have both recorded it, to name but a few) can be a chilling and emotionally devastating ode to the tragedies of lost and abused womenhood everywhere.
And in closing, I should probably give a quick and unspeakably sad R.I.P. to the New Orleans culture from which this incredible song arose.
So – discuss. |
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