When I lived in California and I told people I grew up in Louisiana, most of the time they would say, “Oh, like New Orleans!” and then either tell me they would love to visit there one day or that they love the city. “It’s so fun.”
I’d smile and nod, happy to have a touchstone, but think to myself, “No, not like New Orleans, actually. Los Angeles somehow feels closer to New Orleans than where I grew up.” But that, I knew, would start a long conversation that inevitably ended with glassy eyes. Often, I’d go ahead and let them think I’m a NOLA boy.
When I was growing up in Jackson, though, New Orleans didn’t feel like it was down the road; it felt like the end of the road. It felt about as far away as you could get. It was both the center of the world, being the biggest city in my state, and also the very edge of it: a center of sin and mystery. It was a place you and your friends went to get into some trouble. But in my twenties, that wispy ominousness around New Orleans snapped into hard reality: In a house in New Orleans, my brother died while working as a chef, trying to recover from a heroin addiction.
So, naturally, the song “House of the Rising Sun”—which tells of a mythical place of vice and pleasure in the Crescent City, positioning it as a symbol for hell and death—has resonated with me. I am the young brother that the singer warns “not to do what I have done.”
I always assumed The Animals—the band that sings the version you probably know—were the song’s writers. But, no. Digging deeper, was it Bob Dylan? Woody Guthrie? How about Lead Belly, plucked out of Louisiana’s Angola prison by a record exec?
Still, no.
Who wrote “House of the Rising Sun”?
After weeks of research, I can tell you that the short answer is nobody knows. The more entertaining answer, and probably also a true one, is that nobody wrote it. It is as though the song emerged, ghostlike, from the mountains and hills, through the thousands of mouths of Southern folk singers, long before we had radio, recording machines, or even trains steaming across this land.
My first job out of college was as a traveling salesman, selling software to hospitals across the country—mostly in the South and Northeast. I went to Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and even so far north as Illinois. Being from a small Southern town, I was surprised to find out that the “South” wasn’t just the place below the Mason-Dixon line. The “South” existed everywhere. You just had to drive about forty-five minutes from any major city, and suddenly people were huntin’ and talkin’ with a drawl.
I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing on my radio, thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and McDonalds lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled into thinking we all live the same sorts of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further down the country roads, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up—an older one, one that is probably on its way out. It’s a world you can still hear, if you listen, through the haunted chords of that song.
The song probably first appeared in the late 1800s, after the Civil War. The carpetbaggers began reconstructing, mostly around major Southern cities. As a result, strictly Southern sensibilities tended to survive best in small and remote towns in the hills and mountains (hence “hillbilly”). Singing together on the front porch was a big part of the culture, with some folk singers holding up to 500 songs in their head. This period in the South, from about 1865 until the start of the modern era in the 1930s, is a period unlike almost any other—the seed of so much of the American music that the world still loves today, including “Rising Sun.”
I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing on my radio, thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and McDonalds lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled into thinking we all live the same sorts of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further down the country roads, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up—an older one, one that is probably on its way out. It’s a world you can still hear, if you listen, through the haunted chords of that song.
It was just before the recording machine, and therefore mass media, but just a few years after trains started being built to connect all those little remote towns to the wider world. It was the era of the “ramblers”: the sort of men who tended to cut town for various reasons (usually bad), moving on to the next to try their luck and maybe to share a few songs. They were liable to tempt your kids to run off to the city for “opportunity,” just as likely for drugs, gambling, and prostitution.
Put a few ramblers and rounders together, you had what was called a “medicine show.” These troupes would travel from small town to small town all across the South, playing music and selling snake oil and cure-alls, made by “doctors” with names like Doc Hudson, who were also probably lead men and banjo players.
It was likely, back then, that you might hear a haunting song from a medicine show, half-remember it, and then never see the singer, nor hear their song, again. So, you make it your own, changing the lyrics and melodies slightly to better sing it to your cousins on the front porch. Over the generations, the song survives—retaining only the most emotional, memorable, and resonant melodies and images.
It isn’t difficult to imagine the temptation to pursue a “new life” during those days. A new world was emerging—an exciting world of technology and music and city living, with all its vices. All you had to do was follow any waterway to its very end. They all, eventually, led to New Orleans.
By the turn of the twentieth century—around the time my current house in my hometown of Jackson was built—most everyone living in a Southern small town knew “House of the Rising Sun.” If you asked them how they learned it, they would tell you a grandparent taught it to them, or that they don’t remember. It was always there, it seems, warning about some fault in our souls, one that leads us inevitably down to New Orleans, if we let it, for easy money or good times. It warns us to resist, if we can.
I imagine the men who fought with Andrew Jackson in New Orleans, stopping to camp in my hometown, now named for the general, after the Battle of New Orleans. I think of them here, listening to traveling medicine shows, sharing songs, and maybe dreaming of one day getting back to the city in times of peace.
In some versions of “Rising Sun,” near the end, the singer says they “have one foot on the train, one foot on the platform,” as they contemplate returning to New Orleans. They choose to go back, saying, “My race is nearly run.” They will die under the rising sun.
Most people interpret this as a dark end, and it is. But I also see a moment of hope. Even for this poor character who has wrecked his or her life (the gender flips depending on the version), at this moment, they still have a choice. Like my brother, they’ll choose wrong, in the end. But importantly, he could have stepped off the train. Whatever spirit that gave rise to that haunted song wants you to know, in a small way: There is always hope. No matter how far gone you are, you can always step off the train.
