La Wiki whispers softly to Fhina, for it is Sunday, and La Wiki is sadly hungover from her shenanigans yesterday, celebrating her part in Fhina's demise... and she made Fhina duly correct the error she had made yesterday - Thinking that Stevie Winwood had had anything to do with Vinegar Joe - So thank you to my bloggy encyclopedia chums for putting me right on that one, my lovelies...
It also serves Fhina right, for having dared to try to blog after a trip out to the pub with GJ! In vino veritas, they say... I think not! So now you know how mishtaken Fhina can be when she only relies upon her winey, patchy memory, rather than La Wiki!
Doh!
So, taking no prisoners, La Wiki has once again furnished me with this solution to the questions I put to her about this record...
"The House of the Rising Sun" is a folk song from America. Also called "House of the Rising Sun" or occasionally "Rising Sun Blues", it tells of a life gone wrong in New Orleans. Depending on the version, the song may be sung from the perspective of a woman or a man.
The most successful 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, and Canada.
The oldest known existing recording is by versatile Appalachian artists Clarence "Tom" Ashley, and Gwen Foster and was made in 1933. Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather, Enoch Ashley. The Callahan Brothers recorded the song in 1934.
The song might have been lost to obscurity had it not been collected by folklorist Alan Lomax.Lomax and his father were curators of the Archive of American Folk Song for the Library of Congress from 1932. They searched the country for songs. On an expedition with his wife to eastern Kentucky Lomax set up his recording equipment in the house of a singer and activist called Tilman Cadle. On 15 Sept 1937 he recorded a performance by Georgia Turner, the 16 year-old daughter of a local miner.
He called it The Risin' Sun Blues. Lomax later recorded a different version sung by Bert Martin and a third sung by Daw Henson, both eastern Kentucky singers. Lomax, in his seminal 1941 songbook Our Singing Country, credited the lyrics to Turner, with reference to Martin's version. According to his later writing, the melody bears similarities to a traditional English ballad, Matty Groves".
So we hear from the pen of Alan Lomax again - What a man, what a legend, but how many know his name?
And yet he was responsible for recording and transcribing much of what we repeat and recognise as traditional folk music today... and without Alan Lomax, there would have been no The Animals' House of the Rising Sun. How tragic that would have been, non?!
When she moved into her childhood home, a council terrace in a mining town, Fhina's much-loved dad found the following record, a single, in the coal-shed of their home...
Fhina took it up to her Art Deco wallpapered brown-and-cream boudoir, and played it on and on until her fingers burned, from lifting the needle on and off the seven inch piece of vinyl upon her little dansette player...
Transfixed and transformed, she never knew she would end up living in her little red-brick cottage, next door to an original member of The Animals, John Steel, drumming legend, who is still performing across Europe today...
He's a very private man, and much deserves to be after a lifetime spent helping to create such beauty, so we say hello in the street, and I watch him potter artfully in his garden, he kindly takes in parcels for me when I'm at work, and I bring him the odd bottle of Rioja to say thank you...
...And we never say a word about his past and his great talent...and the legends that are The Animals...
