The Spellcaster's Source Hoodoo and Voodoo Witchcraft Blog of Talia Felix

When one's doing research into the song  House of the Rising Sun , it's hard to get everyone you talk to to leave off the Animals version. One obsession that particular set of lyrics begets is an assumption that the song is necessarily about New Orleans and any actual location called The Rising Sun. The Rising Sun was not an unusual name for colonial taverns, with ones having existed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Milton, Massachusetts, and in Fredericksburg, Virginia; there were also several in England throughout the years, with a famous one in Cloth Fair, London. It was also applied as a name for ships and as a nickname for redheads or people with especially ruddy complexions.  The choice of the name likely has as much to do with the rhyme scheme as anything, and it's the kind of thing that gets easily changed (see Child's collected folks songs about a ship called "The Sweet Trinity" or "The Golden Willow Tree" or "The Golden Vanity" o...

  I often wonder with old folk songs what the "original" tune sounded like. In many cases the song was already very old before anyone bothered to copy down a version of the tune, and in cases like Long Lankin there might be multiple versions floating around by the time anyone became interested. Folk songs were traditionally transmitted orally to people who didn't read music, and by slight misremembering of the tune or by altering it a little to suit one's own performance style, the so called Folk Process would transpire and alter the song, sometimes just in the tune or sometimes in the lyrics as well. I was editing a 17th century commedia dell'arte inspired play and it included lyrics for a song, but had no tune provided. I went out searching for suitable tunes that might fit the lyrics (since it's easier for folks to perform a play when they don't have to write the songs anew) and in digging around I heard this tune, assigned to a 1680s Broadside, here...