Artist: Ashley & Foster
Author: traditional
Label: Vocalion
Year: 1934

Tom Clarence Ashley & Gwen Foster as The Rising Sun Blues, with a Jimmie Rodgers-alike guitar intro (who'd died a couple of months before) and leaving both possibilities open: was it a whorehouse or was it a prison? ("...to spend the rest of my weary life beneath that rising sun"). Tom was part of the same Medicine Show Roy Acuff was in (Doc Hauer's). Tom taught him the song and knew it from his grandmother Enoch Ashley. Although Ashley & Foster sang it from a male perspective, the song is made to be sung by women. The Library of Congress knew about its existence since 1925, although that version lacked any reference to New Orleans. Never published smutty versions from the Ozark Mountains, kept alive among local miners since at least 1905, reveil the bordello background (syfilis included) and situate said house in Baxter Springs (just across the border with Kansas). Historically Related to Lord Barnard And Lady Musgrave, a song from Suffolk, England. Besides, the melody shows some similarities with English ballad Matty Groves (1600s). Alan Lomax (see footnote) once heard folksinger Harry Cox (from Norfolk) sing: "If you go to Lowestoft and ask for the Rising Sun, there you'll find two old whores, and my old woman's one". There once stood a Rising Sun pub in that fishing town, situated so far east in England it has been nicknamed The Town Of The Rising Sun. But don't underestimate the possibility Cox smuggled that Lowestoft verse in his recording to get rid of Lomax and to confuse his theories. Since 2007 this song's the sole subject of a book: Chasing The Rising Sun by Ted Anthony (Simon & Schuster).

"There is a house in New Orleans..." According to songcatcher Alan Lomax many so-called jazz musicians from New Orleans have known this song for ages (pre WW I) and no wonder: the old city center was literally cradled with Houses of the Rising Sun: there was a Rising Sun Coffee House at #9, Old Levee Street (nowadays 115 Decatur), there was the Rising Sun Hotel in Conti Street (burned down in 1822 but archeological excavations reveiled a more than average amount of lipstick & rouge recipients along with masses of empty liquor bottles) and there was the bordello of Madame Marianne du Soleil Levant at #826-830 St. Louis Street, reputed not only for its carnal attractions, also for spiritual ceremonies, symbolized by two ritual voodoo altars, still standing. The house the song refers to is in most cases unmistakeably a whorehouse, but the original house, the one all these Houses Of The Rising Sun were named after, may have been something completely different. Just like a pub called Under The Tower refers to a church nearby, the ball & chain-verse at the end of most song versions and the French translation by Johnny Hallyday (as Le Pénitencier) don't exclude a jail house. Dave Van Ronk, the man who learned Bob Dylan the song, told me he once was shown a photograph of the old Parish Prison of New Orleans (demolished in 1895) with the entrance of the woman's wing adorned with a sandstone engraving of a rising sun motiv, like in the flag of Japan when Japan is (was) at war (The Land of the Rising Sun). Which - still according to Van Ronk - makes it absolutely acceptable for entire segments of the late 19th century population of New Orleans, to use the expression: "He/she's in the House of the Rising Sun" while having to admit a family member was in jail. A long newspaper article about the demolishing of said building (in the Times Democrat of March 10th, 1895) neither mentions the sandstone, nor the nickname, which of course doesn't mean anything: potential readers were not necessarily familiar with the lingo of potential jailbait. The old Parish Prison was a doomed building: in 1891 the scene of the lynching of 11 Sicilians by fellow inmates. In those days, along with the Irish, Italian immigrants were the parias of New Orleans. The prison bordered Storyville, filling the block formed by nowadays St. Ann Street, Tremé, Orleans and Marais. It stood more or less where later the Municipal Auditorium was build (with Congo Square nearby). The Williams Research Center (410 Chartres Street) holds a special map about the prison, with pictures. The same rising sun motiv still adorns many a French Quarter private house, more precisely in the lakeside/downtown quarter bordered by Bourbon, Dumaine, Burgundy and Barracks. Little wood houses in particular, survivors from the French era, which feeds two theories: either these rising sun motives worked like a discreet marker for prostitution in days before Storyville (houses one could stay til the sun comes up), or were just a hint to the French king Louis XIV, nicknamed the Sun King. After all, he gave his name to the state of Louisiana. All things well considered, his Palais at Versailles may well deserve to be entitled the Real House Of The Rising Sun.