The House of the Rising Sun

By the time the Animals recorded it in 1964, "The House of the Rising Sun" was a very old song. Nobody knows who wrote it. It was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, and the oldest known recording, under the title "Rising Sun Blues", was made on September 6, 1933, by Clarence "Tom" Ashley and Gwen Foster. Ashley said he learned it from his grandfather. The earliest printed lyrics appeared in 1925 in Adventure magazine, and miners were said to know it in 1905.

The folk song collector Alan Lomax found other versions. In eastern Kentucky he recorded 16-year-old Georgia Turner, and in 1953 he met an English farm laborer, Harry Cox, who knew a song with a similar opening line. Lowestoft, the most easterly town in the UK, had a pub called The Rising Sun. Woody Guthrie recorded it in 1941, and Lead Belly twice, in 1944 and 1948. Bob Dylan put a version on his 1962 debut album, learned from Dave Van Ronk, who had altered the chords and used a bass line that descended in half steps.

The Animals turned the folk song into a rock record. Their version reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and in the US and Canada, and it has been called the first folk rock hit.