Re: House of the Rising Sun

On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 08:42:53 GMT, "Bernie Woodham"
<birnhamwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Okay, we know Dylan recorded Van Ronk's version and, supposedly, The Animals
>took it from Dylan. I say "supposedly" because I read someone else saying
>the Animals took it from a female folk singer. Who knows?
>
>I'm just wondering about getting more of the history of this song. I know
>LeadBelly did a version call "In New Orleans" that sounds nothing like the
>later version.
>
>It is said the melody comes from an old english folk song and was adapted by
>southern blacks.
>
>Anyone know where I can read more about this song?
>


Check out Dave Van Ronk's autobiography "Mayor of MacDougal Street."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is one final footnote to that story. Like everybody else, I had
always assumed that the "house" was a brothel. But a while ago I was
in New OIrleans to do the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and my wife
Andrea and I were having a few drinks with Odetta in a gin mill in the
Vieux Carre, when up comes a guy with a sheaf of old photographs -
shots of the city from the turn of the century. There, along with the
French Market, Lulu White's Mahogany Hall, the Custom House, and
suchlike, was a picture of a forbidding stone doorway with a carving
on the lintel of a stylized rising sun.

Intrigued, I asked him, "What's that building?"

It was the Orlean's Parish women's prison.

So, as it turned out, I had gotten the whole business wrong from the
get-go. Pity I didn't think it was a Sunday school - I might have
never sung the damn thing in the first place.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------



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