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.

A Hit Brewing in England

Across the Atlantic, in the coal town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,England, an electrical worker’s son named Eric Burdon had immersedhimself in blues and folk. He especially liked a local singer namedJohnny Handel, who sang of shipwrecks and local mining disastersand favored a tune making the rounds called “House of the RisingSun.”

As Burdon’s fledgling musical group, the Animals, came together,he and bandmate Alan Price heard others singing it; Dylan and JoshWhite made deep impressions. So in 1964, when Chuck Berry and JerryLee Lewis came to Britain on tour and the Animals wanted in, thesong seemed an ideal solution.

“I realized one thing: You can’t out-rock Chuck Berry,” saysBurdon, playing air guitar as he reminisces in New Orleans, whichhe visits frequently. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we take this song,reorganize it, drop some of Dylan’s lyrics and get Alan Price torearrange it?’”

Through musicians like Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul andMary, the music of the folk revival had begun to be a real force inpop and rock. And the Animals were more than willing toparticipate.

Their version began with Hilton Valentine’s now-famous guitarriff. Then Burdon’s ragged voice began spitting out lyrics almostresentfully before the organ music kicked in. It was a throbbing,uniquely 1960s anthem.

The band joined the tour and ended the song with a lone redlight bathing Burdon. The audience went nuts, and the Animals wentstraight to the recording studio. Their electric version of GeorgiaTurner’s favorite song swept across the radio waves. On Sept. 5,1964, “The House of the Rising Sun” displaced The Supremes’“Where Did Our Love Go?” to become Billboard’s No. 1.

Jazz, Punk, and German Tango

From there it went everywhere.

Through the decades, artist after artist claimed it and reshapedit: Disco. Country rock. Jazz. Punk. Cajun. Elevator music. EvenGerman tango and harmonica renditions. A band called Frijid Pinkrecorded a version that a young serviceman named Gillis Turner grewto love while serving in Vietnam, and had no idea it was connectedto his Aunt Georgia.

“I think that everybody who’s had a bad day can relate to thatsong,” he says.

It was even appropriated into hip-hop, a genre that relies uponthe reinterpretation of music that came before. When Wyclef Jeanused the melody of “House of the Rising Sun” and added Haitianlyrics, Georgia Turner’s old song was enlisted once again — tolament racism and police brutality in New York City in 1998.

“When you delve into it, you realize how pervasive traditionalsongs are in our culture,” says Peggy Bulger, director of theAmerican Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. “They’re somuch a part of us, but we don’t even recognize it.”

Voices from the Past

Sunday churchgoers are finishing lunch as a friendly 59-year-oldnamed Reno Taylor sits in a diner in Monroe, Mich., a pugnaciousDetroit satellite town. He is discussing his mother, GeorgiaTurner, who died of emphysema in 1969 after 48 years of life.

He remembers her talking of hard times down in Kentucky and howthey coped. “They sang,” he says, “and they drank.”

But her eldest son has not come only to reminisce; he has cometo hear his mother sing.

Her voice is preserved on that old Lomax acetate disc in aclimate-controlled Library of Congress archive, and the library hascopied it onto a cassette, which sits on the table, next to theketchup, in a handheld recorder. “Play” is pushed.

“There is a house in New Orleans …”

Taylor tries to remain impassive. But this is, after all, thevoice of his mother, dead 31 years. And here she is as a girl,singing the blues before life had dealt her so many reasons to doso.

“My mother she’s a tailor …”

Taylor’s eyes betray nothing. He sits ramrod straight,contemplating.

“My sweetheart he’s a drunkard, Lord, Lord …”

Then his cheek muscles twitch. The hint of a smile dawns. Itcan’t hold itself in.

“One foot is on the platform …”

Sure, Georgia Turner is gone and buried, but for afleeting instant she is present in the Monroe Diner, serenading herson on magnetic tape.

Georgia Turner ‘Did Good’

He never knew about the “Rising Sun” connection; he was in theservice when Lomax tracked her down in 1963 and began sending whatroyalties there were. By then, Lomax told her, the song had been“pirated.” Taylor’s sister, Faye, has kept the stubs from the fewchecks that came — $117.50 total, hardly enough to help support 10children.

Taylor wishes she’d gotten enough to buy better medicaltreatment. “It would be so nice,” he says, “if she did get somerecognition for something she did good.”

She did do good, it seems. Her favorite song is a ringing tonefor a mobile phone in Hong Kong. It’s background music in a Thairestaurant in Keene, N.H., and in a hotel in Nanchang, China — andhow many places in between? On the Internet, musicians upload theirown “Rising Suns”; a few weeks ago, Gillis Turner’s daughterdownloaded the Frijid Pink version he so loved in Vietnam.

Why this song? Who knows? Georgia Turner didn’t create it, butshe sang it and it soared. Up from the folkways, onto the highwaysand beyond.

On the Internet, a computer-generated “House of the RisingSun” file is credited this way: “By everyone.” And that’s itexactly. Each time a song moves from new mouth to fresh ear, itcarries its past along.

If you listen just right, you can hear the chorus that camebefore. Clarence Ashley and Roy Acuff and Doc Watson are singing;so are Woody Guthrie and Josh White and Lead Belly, each long gone.The Weavers are harmonizing. Eric Burdon is belting out his best.Germany’s Toots Thielemans is manning the mundharmonika.

And you can hear, too, the miner’s daughter from Middlesboro whonever asked for much and never got much in return. Georgia Turner,dead and silent 31 years, is still singing the blues away.