The House of the Rising Sun is a traditional folk song, also sometimes called Rising Sun Blues. It tells of a life gone wrong in New Orleans. The most successful commercial version was recorded by the English rock group The Animals in 1964, which was a number one hit in the United Kingdom, United States, Sweden, Finland, and Canada.
Origin and early versions
Like many classic folk ballads, the authorship of "The House of the Rising Sun" is uncertain. Musicologists say that it is based on the tradition of broadside ballads such as The Unfortunate Rake of the 18th century and that English emigrants took the song to America where it was adapted to its later New Orleans setting. Alan Price of The Animals has even claimed that the song was originally a sixteenth-century English folk song about a Soho brothel.[1]
The oldest known existing recording is by Appalachian artists Clarence "Tom" Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it for Vocalion Records in 1934.[2] Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather, Enoch Ashley.
The song was among those collected by folklorist Alan Lomax, who, along with his father, was a curator of the Archive of American Folk Song for the Library of Congress. On an expedition with his wife to eastern Kentucky, Lomax set up his recording equipment in Middlesborough, Kentucky, in the house of a singer and activist named Tilman Cadle. In 1937 he recorded a performance by Georgia Turner, the 16-year-old daughter of a local miner. He called it The Rising Sun Blues.[2] Lomax later recorded a different version sung by Bert Martin and a third sung by Daw Henson, both eastern Kentucky singers. In his 1941 songbook Our Singing Country, Lomax credits the lyrics to Turner,[2] with reference to Martin's version. According to his later writing, the melody bears similarities to the traditional English ballad, "Matty Groves".[3][4]..........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Rising_Sun