Here's the legendary folk bluesman and all round songster Josh White performing one of the earliest recordings of "The House of the Rising Sun" from a rare 78 rpm shellac record recorded in 1947.

"The House of the Rising Sun" is a traditional folk song, sometimes called "Rising Sun Blues". It tells of a life gone wrong in New Orleans; many versions also urge a sibling to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version, recorded in 1964 by British rock group the Animals, was a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and also in the United States and France.[1] As a traditional folk song recorded by an electric rock band, it has been described as the "first folk-rock hit".

The oldest known recording of the song, under the title "Rising Sun Blues", is by Appalachian artists Clarence "Tom" Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it for Vocalion Records on 6 September 1933.[6][11] Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather, Enoch Ashley. Roy Acuff, an "early-day friend and apprentice" of Ashley's, learned it from him and recorded it as "Rising Sun" on 3 November 1938.[6][11] Several older blues recordings of songs with similar titles are unrelated, for example, "Rising Sun Blues" by Ivy Smith (1927) and "The Risin' Sun" by Texas Alexander (1928).[5]
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 Middlesboro, Kentucky, in the house of singer and activist 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.[11] 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,[11] with reference to Martin's version.

In 1941, Woody Guthrie recorded a version. A recording made in 1947 by Josh White, who is also credited with having written new words and music that have subsequently been popularized in the versions made by many other later artists, was released by Mercury Records in 1950. White learned the song from a "white hillbilly singer", who might have been Ashley, in North Carolina in 1923–1924.[6] Lead Belly recorded two versions of the song, in February 1944 and in October 1948, called "In New Orleans" and "The House of the Rising Sun", respectively; the latter was recorded in sessions that were later used on the album Lead Belly's Last Sessions (1994, Smithsonian Folkways).

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