Like most great stories there’s a fuzzy line at the edge of fact, and though it’s clear this story refers to somewhere in New Orleans the great web out there says it may actually originate as an English Folk song. We’re pretty sure that the musicologist Alan Lomax recorded the song in Kentucky performed by 16 year old Georgia Turner in September 1937. That one set the tone of many later versions by putting the point of view as female in “The House of The Rising Sun”. It had sex, drugs and alcohol it its cautionary lyrics. Put these in the context of a gambling hall or brothel in the Crescent City and things seemed pretty clear cut.
Nina Simone covered the song live in 1961 and may well have been the record that Alan Price heard when he suggested the song to the Animals for their 1964 hit that got to number one here, in the States and in Europe. They moved the focus of the song to a male viewpoint, though they weren’t first. Shortly after Ms Simone, Bob Dylan also did the song though his muse was gotten by copying the version his friend Dave van Ronk already had in his live set. What’s more Dave had his own theory about the House of the Rising Sun.
Dave’s research dug up a photograph of the entrance gates to the New Orleans Parish Women’s prison – complete with motif of a Rising Sun. So the “ball and chain” of the lyrics could be real not a metaphor for the shackles of married life.
Thanks to the Animals, the song is in the Rock’n’roll Hall of Fame; Frijid Pink scored another number one with the piece in 1969 and Dolly Parton did it on her 9 to 5 album with additional words. Nina Simone was a classically trained pianist who crossed several musical genres from jazz to pop to gospel. Her nickname was “the High-Priestess of Soul”; an independent thinker with a volatile temperament and strong convictions who campaigned for Civil Rights, Nina found herself on the outside of so much of the Establishment, small wonder she included the outspoken song in her armoury.
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