American Pastimes: "House of the Rising Sun" origins, pt. 1.

Most people assume that the “House of the Rising Sun” is about a brothel in New Orleans. It may be. There were definately hotels there named "Rising Sun"  and perhaps they were bordellos. But folksinger Dave Van Ronk once saw a postcard of a New Orleans women’s prison with a rising sun design element on its door, and he believed that was the basis for the song. Another theory is that it’s about a hospital, more specifically a T.B. (tuberculosis) ward. There is at least one old building in New Orleans that once was a T.B. ward and it has a rising sun in relief on the lintel above the front doors. The rising sun was a popular and widespread motif expressed in 19th century American architecture, and it found its way onto a variety of places to avoid.

Some versions of the song don’t refer to New Orleans at all. A version collected in Oregon looks to Brooklyn, New York as the place to avoid, and another collected in Tennessee warns against the evils of Baxter Springs, a cow town in Missouri that had its heyday in the mid 1800’s as a place where cowboys came to play.

"There is a girl in Baxter Springs,
They call her the Rising Sun;
She has broken the heart of nine,
Love, boys, and this poor heart is one."

In the early 1800’s, economic conditions led many Appalachian families to migrate further west. Most eventually settled in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri.  Folklorists have collected multiple versions of “Rising Sun” from a variety of Ozark locations, but none refer to Baxter Springs. Perhaps the Tennessee version was also a lament about the sad but necessary migration west?

As you can see in the Baxter Springs tale, the name “Rising Sun” doesn’t always apply to the business establishment. In another version captured by musician and folklorist John Cohen in the late 1950’s called “Sport in New Orleans,” singer Dillard Chandler of Sodom, North Carolina also referred to the female trouble maker ('sport' was a southern euphemism for 'prostitute') as “Rising Sun.”

Most people assume that the story is always told from the male perspective. Not always true. In some versions the protagonist voice is female. In the earliest written version of the song (found in the National Archives), a tune called “Rising Sun Dance Hall,” the hall is the “ruin of many a poor girl, Great God and I for one.” In this case the “young and foolish poor girl let a rounder lead me astray.”

It’s also commonly thought that the song came from the African-American musical tradition. This is based primarily upon the assumption that the song originated in New Orleans, a major port in the slave trade with a large African-American population, and the city that gave us jazz. The evidence as collected by Alan Lomax and other ethnomusicologists and folklorists disagrees however.

In all of his years of music collecting, Lomax only found versions of the song in southern white Anglo communities . African American folk singer Josh White (b. 1914) seems to confirm this in his autobiographical “The Josh White Songbook.” As a youngster in North Carolina, he heard the tune performed by a “white hillbilly singer.” The hillbilly singer may have been Homer “Bill” Callahan or Clarence “Tom” Ashley. Both toured extensively throughout the south at that time.

Callahan was born in 1912 in North Carolina and learned the song from “a neighbor across the mountains.” According to Callahan it was about a 'notch house' -- a gambling and prostitution house. Callahan became a professional musician as a teen and performed with his brother all over the south. In 1927 he recorded “Rounder’s Luck,” his version of “House of the Rising Sun.”

Ashley was born in 1895 in a town on the border of Tennessee and Virginia. He learned “Rising Sun Blues” at a young age from his maternal grandparents. In 1911 he joined Doc Hauer’s Traveling Medicine Show and toured for 30 years, performing in towns, villages, mining and timber camps, anywhere that a crowd could gather who would be interested in being entertained and in purchasing medicinal elixirs. Traveling medicine shows were the primary form of professional entertainment in the rural south, and the musicians who performed with them were on a never-ending tour with a vast audience. In 1933 Ashley recorded “Rising Sun Blues” for the Vocalion label. His recorded version sounds a lot like an upbeat Jimmie Rogers tune, but with a unique verse that expresses a very bleak opinion about the honesty of women:

"Now boys, don’t believe
What a young girl will tell you
Let her eyes be blue or brown.
Unless she's on some scaffold high
Sayin’ “Boys, I can’t come down.”"

The only time  a woman can be trusted to tell the truth is when she is about to face her maker!

Hard times forced Tom Ashley to give up his music career for good in 1943. He made his way back to the farm and stayed there; farming, but also playing and teaching music to his neighbors. In 1952 two of his old recordings (with him listed as ‘Clarence Ashley’) made it onto Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” record set, the audio bible of folk musicians. Eight years later, folklorist Ralph Rinzler met Ashley at an Old-Time Fiddler’s Convention in North Carolina and mentioned that he had been trying to contact an old-time musician named Clarence Ashley ever since he heard his recordings on the Smith collection. He asked Tom if he knew Clarence. He was surprised by the answer. Eventually Rinzler invited Ashley to record and perform, resurrecting his career and propelling him into the heart of the 60’s folk revival. Ashley brought along one of his students as his accompanist, Arvel “Doc” Watson.

In 1953 Lomax went to England to record balladeers. He was looking for the roots of some of the traditional tunes that he had recorded throughout America. He noted that “House of the Rising Sun” shared similar subject matter and musical meter with a few British ballads, notably “Lord Barnard & Little Musgrave” (aka “Matty Groves”) which dates from the 16th century. While there, Lomax recorded Harry Cox, a laborer and balladeer who was born in 1885 and had an extensive repertoire of songs that he learned from his father and from a lifetime of pub singing. He offered Lomax a “dirty song” that began with this verse:

“If you go to Lowestoft
and ask for the Rising Sun,
there you’ll find two old whores,
and my old woman’s one.”

This version is clearly about a brothel, sung from the man’s perspective. Lowestoft is on the eastern seaboard, and is sometimes associated in a promotional manner with the rising sun. It once had a pub called the 'Rising Sun', but no evidence of a brothel of that name.

But as the song about the “Rising Sun” made its way from England to America, it seems to have transitioned gradually from its “bawdy song” origins into a “cautionary tale.” Brought to the American south by English, Scots & Irish immigrants, it found a home and continued appreciation in small rural communities as a song that warns about the effects and dangers of big city life upon small town men and women; a song about the moral dangers of leaving home. Certainly a widespread and deeply held sentiment.

Source: Ted Anthony’s obsession with “House of the Rising Sun” has produced the definitive book about the song. Anthony is a journalist for the Associated Press. In his spare time he bought every recording he could find of the song, and traveled the country and world in search of answers to his questions about it. The results of his obsession were published as “Chasing the Rising Sun, the Journey of an American Song” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Photo: Clarence "Tom" Ashley, Medicine Show Performer.