The House of the Rising Sun

“The House of the Rising Sun” is a traditional folk song, sometimes called “Rising Sun Blues”. It tells of a person’s life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans. Many versions also urge a sibling or parents and children to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version, recorded in 1964 by the British rock band The Animals, was a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and in the US and Canada. As a traditional folk song recorded by an electric rock band, it has been described as the “first folk rock hit”. The song was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, but probably has its roots in traditional English folk song. It is listed as number 6393 in the Roud Folk Song Index. Like many folk songs, “The House of the Rising Sun” is of uncertain authorship. Musicologists say that it is based on the tradition of broadside ballads, and thematically it has some resemblance to the 16th-century ballad “The Unfortunate Rake”, yet there is no evidence suggesting that there is any direct relation. The folk song collector Alan Lomax suggested that the melody might be related to a 17th-century folk song, “Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave”, also known as “Matty Groves”, but a survey by Bertrand Bronson showed no clear relationship between the two songs. Lomax also noted that “Rising Sun” was the name of a bawdy house in two traditional English songs, and a name for English pubs, and proposed that the location of the house was then relocated from England to the US by white Southern 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 17938) with two possible opening verses, one beginning
Bluesologist for Texas music Coy Prather has argued that “The Risin’ Sun” by Texas Alexander (1928) is an early blues version of the hillbilly song.