Old Song, Story of Modern Culture, Part 1

M I D D L E S B O R O, Ky., Sept. 30, 2000 -- 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.

One American tune of many, up from the folkways, onto thehighways and beyond — propelled by technology and globalization andthe desire to make two things: money and a difference. It is thestory of modern mass culture, of taking something old, addingsomething personal and creating something universal.

It’s the story of the song called “House of the Rising Sun.”

‘First One I Ever Heard’

“Georgie, she’s the first one I ever heard sing it,” says EdHunter, who played harmonica at that 1937 session in Middlesboro.Still sure-footed at 78, he has outlived her by three decades andlives 200 yards from where her family’s home once stood. “Whereshe got it, I don’t know,” he says. “There weren’t many visitors,and she didn’t go nowhere.”

Middlesboro then was even more isolated than today, nearly 50miles of winding roads from the nearest interstate highway. Tuckedinto rugged mountains just west of the Cumberland Gap, wherethousands came west in the 18th and 19th centuries, the town waslaid out by English iron-ore speculators. But even before that,mountaineers of English, Scots and Irish stock, including someTurners, built lives in the hills and, in their isolation,preserved a rich tradition of music and balladry.

Out of this, it seems, “Rising Sun Blues” — aka “House in NewOrleans” or even “Rising Sun Dance Hall” — bubbled up.

It probably started as a bowdlerization of British folk songs.Its melody, Lomax wrote, resembled one arrangement of “MattyGroves,” an English ballad dating to the 1600s. In Britain, theterm “Rising Sun” has long been a euphemism for bordello; in1953, aging English folk singer Harry Cox sung for Lomax a profaneold song called “She Was a Rum One.” Its opening: “If you go toLowestoft, and ask for the Rising Sun, there you’ll find two oldwhores, and my old woman’s one.”

In America, “House of the Rising Sun” has always been morelament than dirty ditty. Various accounts have it kicking aroundthe South since the Civil War, a cautionary tale for those who’dstray. Sometimes, when it came from a man’s mouth, it was agambler’s song. More often, it was a woman’s warning to shun thathouse in New Orleans that’s “been the ruin of many a poor girl.”

A few other musicians from the region were singing it betweenthe world wars. Clarence Ashley, born three mountains over fromMiddlesboro in Bristol, Tenn., sang it as a rounder’s lament. Thesong, he said shortly before his death in 1967, was “too old forme to talk about. I got it from some of my grandpeople.” And aLibrary of Congress correspondent, in a handwritten versionsubmitted in 1925, said he learned it “from a southerner … ofthe type that generally call themselves ‘one o’th’ boys.’”

So it was out there. Ashley, who said he taught it to Roy Acuff,may have recorded it in the 1920s, and the Library of Congresscites (but does not have) a couple of 78-rpm records thatapparently date from before Georgia Turner sang it in 1937.

Sounds of the People

The world then was convulsing with innovation. Just as offsetprinting brought sheet music to the masses in the 1800s, now therevolution of records and radio was making the sound itselfportable.

Enter Alan Lomax, who learned music-collecting from his father,John, a folk-song gatherer since Theodore Roosevelt’s time. TheLomaxes believed technology was threatening local music,introducing homogenization that could overrun regional expression.Even so, by the mid-1930s, the son was using that very technologyto capture people singing songs ladled from the stew of regionalexperience.

“It put neglected cultures and silenced people into thecommunications chain,” Alan Lomax said years later.

The Library of Congress sent him out to record those neglectedcultures. And in September 1937, his journeys took him to the hillsof Eastern Kentucky.

What did he ask Georgia Turner to sing that day? Her favoritesong? The saddest? Lomax didn’t say, and now it may be too late: At85, he is incapacitated by stroke.

In the weeks after Lomax recorded her, two other Kentuckymusicians, both men from two counties north, sang versions of“Rising Sun Blues” into his Presto. Bert Martin in Horse Creekaccompanied himself on guitar; Daw Henson up in Billys Branch sanga capella. And though Lomax did credit Martin for “otherstanzas,” it was Georgia Turner’s version, the only one with theverse that starts, “My mother she’s a tailor,” that he rememberedbest.

So Lomax gave her version a bit of immortality: In 1941, heincluded it in a songbook called “Our Singing Country.”

More important, he told his friends about it. And these weren’tjust any friends.

Continued: Back-Country Tune Hits the Big Time—>