Old Song, Story of Modern Culture, Part 2

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In the early 1940s, the New York folk scene was incubating asmusicians black and white gathered at each other’s apartments toshare songs.

Most of them, more than being musicians, were popularizers.Though Woody Guthrie came straight from small-town Oklahoma, hisstrength was as a showman, bringing white regional experience — viahis own songs and others’ — into a radio and phonograph world.Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, a former prisoner from Louisiana,and Josh White, who grew up touring with black musicians in the1920s, were helping to make “race music” more mainstream.

Into this mix, Lomax brought “The Rising Sun Blues.” Somemight have already heard of it distantly, but he deposited it ontotheir musical doorstep.

White, especially, took to the song. His intense, minor-keyversion, with the first melody that resembles the one familiartoday, introduced a black bluesman’s sensibility that entranced anaudience different from Guthrie’s. (Though Lomax said he taughtWhite the arrangement, White later said he learned it from a“white hillbilly” in North Carolina.)

Roots music was popping up everywhere. Lead Belly sent“Goodnight, Irene” on its way. Aaron Copland adapted fiddler W.H.Stepp’s version of “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Seeger, with his newgroup, the Weavers, turned to Africa for the melodic “Wimoweh,”which became the foundation for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

So it was with “Rising Sun,” which, with the Weavers’ help,became a standard during the folk revival of the 1950s and early1960s. Clarence Ashley, meanwhile, was still singing his old-timeyversion and teaching it to guitar picker Doc Watson. Each musicianbrought a new interpretation, a new sensibility.

Then, in 1961, a skinny 20-year-old Woody Guthrie fan fromMinnesota took a turn with the song. His musician friend Dave VanRonk had arranged a haunting version, and the singer decided“House of the Risin’ Sun” would be a memorable part of his debutalbum.

It turned out Bob Dylan was right.