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…
