Old Song, Story of Modern Culture, Part 1
M I D D L E S B O R O, Ky., Sept. 30 -- She’d sing it wherever she went in thosedays — around the neighborhood, hanging the wash outside herfamily’s wooden shack, and especially when folks would gather toplay some harmonica, pick some banjo and push the blues away.
Everyone knew the song was old, though they weren’t sure whereit came from. But in 1937, around Middlesboro’s desperately poorNoetown section, it came from the mouth of the miner’s daughter wholived by the railroad tracks, the girl named Georgia Turner.
One day, a man showed up from the East, a young guy in an oldcar trolling Kentucky’s mountains with a bulky contraption torecord people singing their songs. Georgia — blond, pretty, just 16— gathered up her mother and headed over to Tillman Cadle’s house.In a nasal drawl she performed her favorite, the twangy lamentcalled “Rising Sun Blues.”
That day, Georgia Turner made her contribution to musicalhistory.
Until she sang into Alan Lomax’s Presto “reproducer,” herbeloved tune belonged primarily to the American folk tradition:staunchly regional, shifting as it was passed from this front porchto that one, rarely committed to writing.
On Sept. 15, 1937, it stepped into 20th century popular culture.
Sounds of the Century
Lomax put it into a songbook, and it spread like a cold into the1940s New York City folk music scene. To Pete Seeger and WoodyGuthrie, to Lead Belly, to Josh White, who may have known italready. Each put it on a phonograph record and passed it tothousands more.
With each year the ripples widened — into the folk revival andbeyond, to a British Invasion band called the Animals that arrangedthe breakthrough version, “The Hit,” the one you hear in your headwhen you think of the song.
From there, as years passed, it crossed genres and oceans:Celtic and Latin, reggae and disco, trance and punk and easylistening. It has become a melody for a hip-hop artist’s Haitianlyrics.
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