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"The House of the Rising Sun" is a traditional folk song, sometimes called "Rising Sun Blues". It tells of a person's life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans. Many versions also urge a sibling or parents and children to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version, recorded in 1964 by the British rock band The Animals, was a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and in the US and Canada. As a traditional folk song recorded by an electric rock band, it has been described as the "first folk rock hit".
The Southern Journey is the popular name given to a field-recording trip around the Southern States of the USA by the renowned ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. He was accompanied on the trip by his then-lover, English folk singer Shirley Collins. It resulted in the first stereo field-recordings in the Southern United States, and is perhaps most noted for the 'discovery' of 'Mississippi' Fred McDowell. The music collected on the trip has had inestimable impact on the development of popular music. Tracks recorded on the trip were sampled by Moby for his Platinum-selling album Play. It also served as the inspiration for the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers' film O Brother Where Art Thou. The Southern Journey is the subject of a fascinating autobiography by Shirley Collins entitled 'America over the Water'. It is also the subject of s 2017 feature documentary, The Ballad of Shirley Collins. Lomax' own recollections of the trip were documented in his autobiography "The Land Where Blues Began", which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1993.
References
- Ted Anthony, Chasing The Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song, 2007
- Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America, in the English Language, 1960
- 1 2 3 Anthony, Ted (September 17, 2000). "On Folkway, Highway, Song Rises Ever Anew". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved January 16, 2023.
- ↑ "The Life of a Song: 'The House of the Rising Sun'". www.ft.com. 2015-06-05. Retrieved 2020-10-28.
