Number 62 in Vance Randolph's Roll Me in Your Arms "Unprintable" Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, Volume 1 (Folksongs and Music) G. Legman editor, University of Arkansas Press 1992, p 250-253.

THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

Slow Blues
¾ Time Key Em

There (Em) is a (B7) in New Or (B7) leans
They call it the (A7) Ris in (B7) sun
Its (Em) been the (A7) ru in of many (Em7) young (Em) girls
And me, (Em7) dear (B7) God, I'm (Em) one.
Me dear (B7) God I'm (Em) one.

Go tell my little sister,
Don't do like I have done-
Tell her, Shun that house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
The call the Rising Sun…

A. Sung by Miss G.M., of Salt Lake City, Utah, for G. Legman, at La Jolla, California, October 1964. The singer, who was nineteen years old, and a Mormon, said that she had learned the song "from other college girls" at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she had just spent a semester and suffered a heart-breaking love experience. Se other of this girl's songs, and the notes concerning than, At Nos. 61, "Poor Lil", No 75 "Left Me with Child"; and No 174, "Chippy on the Rooftop," all of these songs heavily imprinted with her personal misery and superb singing. She refused to sing any more of "The House of the Rising Sun" after the first two stanzas, as above, and claimed she didn't know the rest. Compare version B here, giving the complete text of this lacerating (Answer to original thread question here) "white blues," as sung by another young woman.

This song was apparently firs taken down by Alan Lomax "in 1937, from the singing of a thin pretty, yellow-headed miner's daughter," named Georgia Turner, in Middleborough, Kentucky, and was printed by him in Our Singing Country (1941) p. 369, reprinted in his Folk Songs of North America (1960) pp 280 and 290, No. 151, as "The Rising Sun Blues," omitting the title-word "House" to avoid any such direct reference to prostitution, the whole subject of the song! He give two variant melodies neither of which is the same as the present version, which has fewer of the highly emotional leaps swoops, and slurs of Lomax's first tune, probably typifying the original singer's intense rendition. He observes that his tune is related to that of Child Ballad No. 81, known in America as "Little Mathy Groves," or "Lord Daniel," and that a related song, not identified, was "found in Suffolk, England, by Peter Kennedy," (See: Brown, vol 11, p. 101, and Bronson No 81.)

Almost facing the point, Lomax adds, p. 280: "The story, which concerns the sordid path that poverty has forced many country girls to follow, may date back to pre-Civil War days; country boys and girls landed there, after rafting all the way down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers." Mark Twain, for example. It is remarkable, but a fact, that at a date so late as 1960, and aware media-personality like Alan Lomax could publish a warning song like this against prostitution, leaving the entire subject and meaning of the song – which also give no details whatsoever, except as to a drunkard who want to "igt on a great big drunk" – to be divined by strictly "non-verbal communication" and the only key-words ventured or dropped: "ruin" "sordid" and especially "House," this being short for whorehouse, bawdy-house, or house of prostitution. However, he also omits even this over-significant word "house" from the title, calling it "The Rising Sun Blues," which suggests and entirely different subject, perhaps connected with the literal rising sun as marking the beginning of the working day.

The great Negro singer Josh White popularized Lomax's avowed "adaptation" of this song on phonograph records and in nightclub performances all over the United States during the 1950's and this was very probably the ultimate the source of the present singer's oral knowledge of the song, at second hand "from other college girls." Another college girl, later, who learned the song directly from the Josh White record, to the degree even of imitating his Southern pronunciation in singing it, stated that she was moved by the profound emotionalism of the tune and song's intense warning against amateur prostitution, to which she to had been unexpectedly exposed on arriving in New York with her California master's degree, at the age of twenty-one, to find a job. (Compare the opening scene of John Cleland's Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, London, 1749 Oxford University Press bicentennial edition- their first – 1985, excellently edited by Peter Sabor.) Those river rafts arriving before the Civil War, to furnish the whorehouses of N'Orleans and London, with naïve country girls, are now mammoth busses and economy jet-plane flight arriving in Los Angeles and New York. "Go tell my little sister…"

B. Sung for G. Legman in Paris, 1956 by Miss Rachel Carle, a young American college woman on here "Junior year abroad" from a western women's college, to her own guital accompaniment. As to the final "find my child beneath that Rising Sun" the singer said she believed that meant the girl's baby had been aborted and thrown into the outhouse privy of the brothel, or prison:

The is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun,
It's been the ruin of many a girl; and me, poor girl, I'm one!
Me, poor girl, I'm one

My mother she is honest, she sews on new blue jeans,
My sweetheart is a drunkard, Lord! drinks down in New Orleans.
Drinks down in New Orleans.

He took me from my mother's home, he dragged me in the slime,
He sold me into the parlor-house where I must do my time,
Lord! I must do my time.

Go tell my baby sister; Don't do what I have done,
And shun that house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun.
They call the Rising Sun.

It's one foot on the platform, the other on the train,
I'm going back to New Orleans – I'll wear the ball and chair,
I'll wear the ball and chain.

I'm going back to New Orleans, my time is almost done
I'm going back to find my child beneath that Rising Sun.
Beneath that Rising Sun.

C. Note that in all three following Ozark version of this song, the protagonist is a wayward boy who has been "lead to hell's eternal brink," meaning infected with a venereal disease (or "worse": see endnote E below) by the prostitutes at the sign of the Rising Sun, and is not one of the girl prostitutes, as in the Lomax Kentucky version. The final warning is also therefore to the brother, not the sister. Manuscript text from a lady in Benton County, Arkansas, November 6, 1949. She heard it sung by her brother, about 1920 with sever "nasty" verses which she could not remember:

There is a house in New Orleans,
They call it the Rising Sun,
Has been the ruin of many a boy,
Good God, an' I am one.

Beware the red light out in front
An' the pictures on the wall.
An' yellow gals dressed in purple shoes
Without no clothes at all.

Shun the red light an' flowin' bowl,
Beware of too much drink,
Them whores will take an' lead you on
To hell's eternal brink.

Tell brother Jim at home alone
Bad company to shun,
Or it will surely lead him on
To do as I have done.v

There is a house in New Orleans,
They call it the Rising Sun.
Has been the ruin of many a boy,
Good God, an' I am one.

D. This fragment seems to consist of the "nasty" verses the lady offering version C "could not remember," Sung by Mr. R.S. Joplin, Missouri, March 19, 1950. He says that similar verses were sung by miners around Joplin as long ago as 1905:

There is a house in New Orleans,
They call it the Rising Sun,
An' when you want your pecker spoilt
That's where you get it done.

They drink all day an' fuck all night
Until you money's gone:
They kick your ass out in the street
When the second shift come on….

E. Sung by Mr. D.S., Fort Smith, Arkansas, February 24, 1951. She would not sing it into a tape recorder, as she said she had hear there was a law against singing songs about "bad houses";

There is a house in New Orleans,
They call it the Rising Sun,
It's been the ruin of many a lad,
An' me oh Lord, for one.

Go fill the glasses to the brim
We'll drink to the rambling boy…
Go tell my younger brother
Not to do as I have done,
And shun the house in New Orleans
That's called the Rising Sun.

Aside from the powerful rendition by Josh White, mention above, issued on long-playing records in the 1950's, the song was also recorded by The Weavers on Sod-Bust Ballads (Commodore 78 rpm records) issued in 1947. This album is reviewed by Charles Seeger, in Journal of American Folklore (1948) vol. 61: pp 215-18, in a review-essay of American folksongs on records, all four albums reviewed being produced by his nephew Alan Lomax, with notes by him.

The sign itself of the "Rising Sun" probably refers to some gilt or yellow-painted version of the large sculptured or gilt wooden chrysanthemum-style circular decoration often placed as a sun-ray mirror indoors, or over the outside door of fine houses in France, and derivatively in French New Orleans (Nouvelle Orleans until the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon in 1803) during and after the reign to 1715 of Louis XIV, "le Roi Soleil" or Sun0King, whose royal insignia it was. At the folk level, Southern French farmer to this day nail a large dried sunflower over their barn or garage doors, creating a similar effect. When asked the reason for this they reply vaguely that it brings luck, or "averts misfortune." usually meaning the Devil and all his works.

It is possible that his is a survival of "sympathetic" magic, as with the rather similar bodiless but winged cherub faces sculptured on architrative decoration over doors or windows. A youngish woman member of the Surrealist anti-artistic movement in Paris, gave me the following information learned in her native Tarn, a wild mountainous area in the south of France; that in the days of the chauffeurs who were gangs of murderous hotel keepers in the Adrets mountain pass on the road from Marseilles to Cannes, and in the lumber town of Pegomas nearby, until suppress just before the French Revolution, "devil-worshippers protected by rich noblemen" would nail a sacrificed human infant child to an outdoor wall overlooking their nighttime orgies of murder and sex. Compare the singer's remark at note B above as to the aborted child being thrown into the privy under the "House of the Rising Sun," a common occurrence in medieval brothels (and reportedly nunneries) and throughout the Orient today. Compare also the chauffeur style plot of several highly popular cult horror-films in the United States throughout the 1980's. (And since…)

Grouped above, from Nos. 58, "A Dark and Rolling Eye" (the sixteenth or seventeenth-century "The Fire-Ship") through No. 62, "The House of the Rising Sun," are various songs about prostitution (female) ranging from its almost romantic pastourelie form of street or wayside seduction in the protochatey, "The Fire-Ship," with its tragic result; through the mock-humorous defiance of "Facinatin' Lady" and "Poor (Opium) Lil," to its wholly tragic aspect under "The Rising Sun." Beyond that, see the forth group of prostitution songs, all unfortunately collected without their tunes, in vol. II here, from No.s 195, "The Eleventh Street Whores," and 196 "The Whorehouse Bells," through No. 198, "St James Infirmary," also know in the American southwest as "The Streets of Laredo," both being versions of Laws, 131, the eighteenth-century admonitory broadside, "The Unfortunate Rake," in which the young man )or sometimes a young female prostitute) dies of venereal disease.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle