I always assumed The Animals (the version you probably know) wrote the song. But, no. Bob Dylan? No. Woody Guthrie? No. How about Lead Belly, plucked out of Louisiana’s Angola prison by a record exec? Still, no.
Who wrote The Rising Sun?
I can tell you the short answer is nobody knows. The more entertaining answer, and probably also a true one, is that nobody wrote it. It emerged like a singing ghost from the hills, through the thousands of mouths of Southern and Appalachian folk singers, long before we had radio, recording machines, or even trains started striping the woods.
My first job out of college was a traveling salesman, selling software to hospitals all across the country, mostly in the South and Northeast. I went to Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and even so far north as Illinois. Being from a small Southern town, I was surprised to find that the “South” wasn’t just the place below the Mason-Dixon line. You just had to drive about 45 minutes from any major city, and suddenly people were huntin’ and talkin’ with a drawl.
I drove to many places like these, sometimes with “House of the Rising Sun” playing (I especially liked the Alt-J version at the time), thinking about what this country was like before Walmart and a McDonalds lined every interstate. Because of that universal backlit plastic signage, we can be fooled to think we all live the same sort of lives. But if you do ever drive a little further, which I sometimes did to find a certain rural hospital, a whole different universe opens up. An older one, and one that is probably fading from memory. You can still hear it, if you have the ear for it, through the haunted chords of that song, it’s first singers’ voices still echoing above the burning pines, the heat beneath its wings.
The song probably first started appearing in the late 1800s. The carpet baggers began reconstructing mostly around major Southern cities, so strictly Southern sensibilities tended to survive in small and remote towns in the hills and mountains (hence “hillbilly”). Some of those hillbillies had up to 500 folk songs in their head. This period from about 1865 until the start of the modern era in the 1930s is a period unlike almost any other: the seeds of the American music that the entire world still loves today, practically all of them planted then and there.