Woody Guthrie
Bob Dylan
“House of the Rising Sun” is another song you can read about on Wikipedia, its incredible origins. Like a lot of people I first heard it as a song recorded by the Animals, and I thought it was a song by the Animals for the longest time, until very recently, when I learned not only Bob Dylan had recorded it on his debut album a mere three years earlier than the Animals version, but Woody Guthrie before Dylan…and apparently it was a well-traveled folk song for…probably…centuries before that. Like true folk songs it becomes impossible to learn the actual origins, only the places here and there where it surfaces, like little signposts.
So in effect it’s one of the purest folk songs we currently enjoy. The Animals version is iconic in its own right, a defining moment in the band’s relatively short history, in the history of the era it came from (the Sixties), rock music itself, and apparently folk (most people tend to associate Dylan as straddling the line, but history flattens everything). It’s one of my favorite songs, anyway, caused me to track down an Animals hits compilation for my collection a decade ago once I realized how important the song was to me.
And as someone who likes collecting songs to try and learn to sing, it’s always nice to think of this as a part of a long tradition. Because that’s what music is really all about.
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