Heart of the Hills
by K.C. Rawley
“Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song”
By Ted Anthony
Ever since the Beatles invaded America in 1964 with an album that contained mostly rhythm and blues covers, a few original songs, and a version of ‘Till There Was You’ from The Music Man, British bands have been strip-mining American culture and selling it back to us as the next new thing.
John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers was a virtual clearing house for British guitarists spinning Chicago-style blues into rock gold in the mid-1960s, with Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce of Cream and Mick Fleetwood, Peter Green, John McVie of Fleetwood Mac beginning their careers apprenticing with Mayall, then moving on.
By the time Fleetwood Mac did the 1969 live ‘In Chicago’ LP with American blues greats Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Otis Spann, and Walter Horton, the roots-rock lovefest had come full circle.
But possibly the single most successful selling back of Americana to the colonials was Eric Burdon and the Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun,’ which knocked Motown darlings the Supremes’ ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ out of Billboard’s number one slot on Sept. 5, 1964 and would top the U.S. and U.K. charts for weeks.
Burdon’s soulful growl of, “There is a house in New Orleans, they call the Rising Sun. It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know I’m one,” helped the song break out of the folk/blues netherworld and into pop culture, where it is still being covered today. Associated Press reporter Ted Anthony spent $10,000 and years of his life trying to uncover the roots of “House of the Rising Sun,” which the Animals cribbed from Bob Dylan, who might have learned it from his then-girlfriend, Joan Baez, who might have heard it from Alan Lomax.
Lomax was what musicologists call a ‘songcatcher,’ one among those hardy souls who ventured into the Ozark and the Appalachian mountains searching out, then recording for posterity, pure and lost versions of folk songs that English, Irish, and Scots immigrants brought with them to the new world.
After years of intense research which took Anthony from one mountain range to another, then to New Orleans, he has determined that Lomax’s acetate disc of Georgia Turner, a 16-year-old coal miner’s daughter from Middlesex, Kentucky, singing ‘The Rising Sun Blues,’ is the first of what would be hundreds of recordings of the cautionary tale.
In his well-documented book, Anthony traces the various permutations of ‘House of the Rising Sun,’ some of them told from a male perspective, and some like Turner’s, from a woman’s. To a core set of verses, singers and interpreters have added a variety of new words, giving rise to arguments about whether the eponymous ‘house’ was a jail, brothel, card room, roadhouse, or workhouse.
Anthony’s journey brings him in contact with fascinating characters like Joe Bussard, a record collector from Maryland who spins his tens of thousands of 78-rpm records for anyone who cares to listen, just to share the joy, and Homer Callahan, who learned 
“House of the Rising Sun” during a corn shucking in North Carolina. (“They’d bury a five-gallon jug of corn whiskey in an enormous pile of corn and the first neighbor to reach the bottom got the liquor.”)
In relating the culture of people that many consider ‘hillbillies’ or ‘hicks,’ Anthony shows no condescension — only compassion and affection for hard-working people scratching a living out of the hill country and creating music to ease the pain of it all. His admiration for Georgia Turner, whom he figures was cheated out of years of royalty payments, is evident in passages like this one, describing the Lomax recording session:
Sometimes pivot points in culture happen quickly and pass unnoticed at first. I have no reason to believe that this moment was any different. The ripples that this particular recording of this particular song would make were still in the future. It was nothing but an unknown song about a girl with a hard life behind her, sung from the heart by an unknown girl with a hard life ahead of her.
In addition to pages of photos — including one of the Animals in preposterous matching checkered suits with stovepipe pants — the book provides discographies, footnotes, and a list of highlights from Anthony’s now-extensive collection of disparate versions of ‘House of the Rising Sun,’ like Hardest Rocking, Freakiest Adaptation, Most Danceable, Most Haunting, and Oddest.
For the record, The Oddest is by the Timo Kinnunen One-Man Band from Finland, which features a kazoo and “a voice like what you might hear if Stephen Hawking took requests.” And it’s not the only Finnish version Anthony has. But then he has $10,000 worth of versions.
For all the rest of the versions, you’ll have to ride shotgun with Anthony on a musical road trip deep into the heart of America. It’s a ride worth taking.
Book: Chasing the Rising Sun
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: July 2007
Available at: All major book sellers
Price: $26
Cover art care of Simon & Schuster media relations site
