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The Story Behind “The House of the Rising Sun”
I: That girl from Kaintuck
“Georgia, hurry up! He’s at Cadle’s!”
“Okay, mama,” Georgia Turner answers, wiping her hands on a dish cloth. The sixteen-year-old’s birthday is today, September 15, 1937. She and her mother walk out of the log house onto the dirt street of Noetown, a poor shanty neighborhood of Middlesboro, Kentucky.
They’re going to go sing at Tillman Cadle’s house. A man has come down from Washington, D.C. to hear the old music. Mary Gill Turner is known in the neighborhood for her religious songs. The blond-haired Georgia, who always seems to be singing, likes ballads and the blues best.
They pass a muddy Studebaker as they approach the Cadle home. Automobiles are still a rare enough sight in Noetown that Georgia pauses for a moment to look inside. She’s never ridden in a car.
The two join the crowd, centered around a young man, not that much older than Georgia. But he’s treated with deference, as much for being the master of the bulky piece of machinery he’s working over as anything else.
Alan Lomax’s Presto disc recorder had been supplied by The Library of Congress for his first solo field recording expedition. The Presto was billed as a portable model, but at 350 pounds was “portable” only in a copywriter’s imagination, handle or not. Lomax traveled with the machine in the back of his Studebaker. In order to record in places where there was no electricity, like Noetown, Lomax used the Studebaker’s battery, which he attached to a transformer, which in turn was attached to an amplifier. Lomax was finishing the last connection from amplifier to Presto when Georgia and her mother walked in.
Mary Gill sang a few songs into Lomax’s machine, and then it was Georgia’s turn. Lomax lifted another of the massive, black, glass platters onto the machine and beckoned Georgia over. She began with an old standard, Married Life Blues. Then she leaned into Lomax’s microphone and began another song, first tentatively, then more strongly, as the sadness of the story seemed to take over her voice.
There is a house in New Orleans
they call the Rising Sun.
It’s been the ruin of many a poor…
