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Number of articles: 6
First Article: September 16, 2022
Latest Article: September 8, 2023
My older sister rarely speaks when unnecessary. Actually, Lucy rarely speaks. To be fair, she studied meditation in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Tokyo and has embarked on countless vows of silence at various points of her adolescence—one way to cope.
The Sun has risen. Now it must set. And it’s this circuitry that guides our pop cultural cog that sustains the future-life of “House of the Rising Sun.” All that was old must be new again.
The decades following The Animals’ smash hit brought with them a host of “House of the Rising Sun” reincarnates, the song’s narrative thrust never succumbing to marketplace inertia. By the dawn of the seventies, slipstreams opened for sprawling innovations over a deep-seated tradition.
Let the arpeggiated A minor chord sound! We have arrived at the most recognizable iteration of the song in question. British pop-rock outfit The Animals sent “House of the Rising Sun,” our meager folk tune, to the top of the UK singles chart in 1964 with an arrangement that, in keeping with the folk idiom, was not their own handiwork.
By the mid-1940’s, “House of the Rising Sun” had existed for decades as a folk standard, but when Huddie Ledbetter (a.k.a. Leadbelly), a giant of the Mississippi Delta Blues and 12-stringed guitar virtuoso, picked up the track, the song’s acclaim began to approach echelons beyond the merits of canonization.
The Beatles, Nina Simone, Tangerine Dream, Leadbelly, The Supremes, Tracy Chapman, Dolly Parton, Kult, Sinead O’Conner, Jimi Hendrix, Toto and Muse all have one thing in common: they’ve released a cover of the folk-blues tune “The House of the Rising Sun.” As one of the most covered songs of all time, the track serves as an exemplar of the folk tradition—music that is passed down through hearing and playing, not formal tablature.
