I have to comment on the repeated attribution of the minor chords to Dave Van Ronk. Sorry, but it's just not true. Dave originated many a good thing, but not this.

The minor chords he uses for "House of the Rising Sun" were in circulation well before Dave was heard of in folk circles—he broke in roughly (oops, pun) in 1958. His first album (Folkways—I think it included the song—did not come out until 1959, by which time the minor-key "House of the Rising Sun," chords and all, had become a standard.

I heard the song, with the now familiar minor chords, sung in singarounds as early as 1952, and was singing it myself, with those chords, by 1953-4.

I didn't stay with the guitar version myself, because by the following year I was hearing other ways of doing the song. When I heard Hally Wood sing it a capella I was enchanted (what a marvelous singer she was), and for a while sang it unaccompanied. I also collected a brief version with a slightly different minor tune from Ben F. Moomaw in Roanoke, Virginia in summer 1955 that affected my later way of doing the song.

Bottom line: look for the origin of that minor-key arrangement somewhere in the late 1940s or no later than 1952.

Bob