There was a House in New Orleans

I really liked playing this on my ancient Yamaha CP300. It’s the slowdown/pace and the instrument mix, especially the measured use of the organ.

Electronic piano with sound technician, on break

For a much better version (LOL), see and hear young Bob Dylan’s and the Animals’ one below.

My mother said that her father Ursa Freed’s favorite song was “The House of the Rising Sun.” He was a troubled architect in Aberdeen, South Dakota who would disappear on long gin-soaked benders. Perhaps the ancient song spoke to him about sin and dissipation. Both of his sons preceded him in death, one in war and one in sickness.

I doubt he would have recognized the most well known version (by the Animals) that came out seven years after his death.

For the song’s history, see this. Fascinating.

I just did/mainly spoke-sung three of the many different versions of the lyrics.

New Orleans is haunting. Dylan says he found his voice again there with tunes like Man in the Long Black Coat .

Dylan in his memoir: “New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it.” 

We traveled from DeKalb through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans to hear Dylan in New Orleans at some point early in the millennium, after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq and Katrina. On another trip there I engaged in a long drunken argument with a right-wing lunatic in the French Quarter.

We’ve seen Dylan in Sioux Falls, SD, DeKalb, IL, Chicago, Buffalo, NY, and Memphis, TN, and other places I can’t recall right now.

This is Dylan singing House of the Rising Sun on his first album -- check out his voice in his early 20s:

David Von Ronk did not take kindly to this recording. Said it was a rip off of his arrangement. Probably was.

Von Ronk is in the far right of this picture:

Dyland said that the Animals’ famous 1964 version of the THotRS (which I still think is cool) opened the door for the transition from folk to rock and roll for him.