New Orleans or nowhere: How the ‘House of the Rising Sun’ became the most debated address in music
“There is a house in New Orleans…”, all you have to hear is that, along with the A minor chords, and the rest is in your head.
In 1964, The Animals released the most well-known version of the song, but already by that time it begged the question of what on earth a band from Newcastle was doing singing about a house in New Orleans, and whether the house even existed.
While The Animals made the track a resounding 1960s hit, which is really how it’s remembered today, the material dates back so much earlier than that, so early in fact that its actual origins are essentially lost. ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ is an old folk song, and like so many old folk songs, any facts about its writer or its first performances have ended up erased over time.
Often called ‘Rising Sun Blues’, the song was initially thought to be a miners’ tune. This led some to assume that one of the workers had simply written it on a whim, started singing it, and that it then spread in the usual way, passed between friends, sung in bars, and gradually picked up by others. However, the first known recording appeared in 1933, by Appalachian musicians Clarence ‘Tom’ Ashley and Gwen Foster. They said they had learned it from Ashley’s grandfather, who believed he had first heard it during the Civil War, suggesting the song had been around far longer than people originally thought.
In 1937, a little girl from Kentucky, called Georgia Turner, recorded a version too, which was released in the Library of Congress album Our Singing Country, in 1941, becoming the first broadly shared recording. But as for the origins, the mystery endured, with plenty of music theorists and historians weighing in. While the song sings of New Orleans, they’re not sure if it started there, so Alan Lomax, a folk song collector fascinated by this mysterious tune, did some serious digging.
Down one path, he wondered if the song was actually English, for the structure of it seemed similar to traditional broadside folk songs, and in two of those tunes, the name the rising sun appears as the name of a brothel, with one singing, “If you go to Lowestoft, and ask for The Rising Sun / There you’ll find two old whores and my old woman is one”.
Lomax began travelling around the world making recordings of as many different people as possible, singing the version of the track that was local to them, including British folk names and that early Georgia Turner version. It was sending him from place to place, from English villages to the Appalachian mountains to Kentucky, to Texas, and between folk artists and blues artists who seemed to also know the song without knowing where from.
One thing was especially intriguing, though, which is that his research never really sent him to New Orleans. Despite that being the place mentioned in the song, the majority of his findings came from further north than that spot, perhaps making sense of the lyric, “I’m going back to New Orleans”, written by someone who had left.
And so still today, ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ is a mystery as the origins of the song, and the whereabouts of the house, if there ever even was one, remain unknown, despite what New Orleans tour guides will tell you.
