I'm currently reading The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk (with Elijah Wald). Absolutely fascinating book! I find Van Ronk's observations and opinions on the folk scene, both in New York and the country in general, right on the money—which is to say, my observations from over here in the northwest corner of the country, especially about the dynamics of the "folk revival" or "Great Folk Scare," tend to be pretty much the same as his (although there are some subtler ins and outs of the New York scene that I'm learning from the book).

For any folk music enthusiast, especially those who are curious about the course of increasing popular interest in folk music through the Fifties, into the Sixties, and beyond, this is a must read.

Regarding "House of the Rising Sun," Van Ronk devotes part of a chapter to his relationship to that particular song. After describing how he learned the song, worked out an arrangement for it, and had been singing it for awhile, and how Bob Dylan (a newcomer relative to Van Ronk) learned it from him and recorded it (with basically his arrangement), and it had then been picked up by the Animals (with pretty much the same arrangement), and then suffering the general aggravation of having people (even in France) ask him to sing "that Bob Dylan song," Dave Van Ronk concludes the chapter, "Changing of the Guard" with the following paragraphs:

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               There is one final footnote to that story. Like everyone else, I had always assumed that the "house" was a brothel. But a while ago I was in New Orleans to do the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and my wife Andrea and I were having a few drinks with Odetta in a gin mill in the Vieux Carré, when up comes a guy with a sheaf of old photographs—shots of the city from the turn of the century. There, along with the French Market, Lulu White's Mahogany Hall, the Custom House, and suchlike, was a picture of a forbidding stone doorway with a carving on the lintel of a stylized rising sun.
               Intrigued, I asked him, "What's that building?"
               It was the Orleans Parish women's prison.
               So, as it turned out, I had gotten the whole business wrong from the get-go. Pity I didn't think it was a Sunday school—I might have never sung the damn thing in the first place.

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Now, whether or not this is what the song actually refers to is quite probably open to debate, but it certainly gives an intriguing twist to the whole thing. Remember that various people have written new verses to this over the years. Should one know verses that definitely refer to the "house" as a brothel, one would need some provenance on those particular verses to establish them as part of the original rather than verses that were added later by someone who assumed (as most people do) that "The House of the Rising Sun" was a brothel rather than a prison.

Don Firth