This post starts with an honest admission: "The House of the Rising Sun" is not an Irish song, and no Irish origin for it has been verified. It is an Appalachian ballad — an old song that crossed the Atlantic with emigrants, changed its setting and its singer in America, and came back around the world through the folk revival. Plenty of songs on this blog that did start in Ireland travelled the same road. This one is a guest in the set, and it earns its place with a documented story better than most songs get.
The title's question — brothel or gambling den? — has a real answer, and it depends on which version you are listening to.
Georgia Turner, 16, Sang It Into the Library of Congress in 1937
In September 1937, the collector Alan Lomax recorded a sixteen-year-old girl named Georgia Turner, a miner's daughter in Middlesboro, Kentucky, singing a song she called "The Rising Sun Blues." Lomax deposited the recording at the Library of Congress and published her lyrics in Our Singing Country in 1941. Her version became the ancestor of the hundreds that followed: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, and Josh White all learned and recorded it in her line.
She was not the first to record it. The oldest known recording is by Clarence "Tom" Ashley and Gwen Foster, cut in 1933 and released by Vocalion as "Rising Sun Blues." Ashley had learned it from his grandfather. So the song's paper trail starts in the Appalachian mountains in the 1930s, with a family handing it down — the same way songs moved around Ireland, except this family was in Kentucky.
Was the Rising Sun a Brothel? What the Early Lyrics Say
In Georgia Turner's version, the house in New Orleans has been the ruin of many a poor girl — and the singer is one of them, warning her family to keep her younger kin away from the life she fell into. The singer is a woman, and in her lyric the house reads plainly as a brothel: a place that took girls in and used them up.
The gambling-den and prison readings came later, and they came from a change in the song. When the singer became a man — a gambler who ruined himself in New Orleans — the house had to become something a man could be ruined by, and gambling, drink, and prison filled the space the brothel had occupied. So the answer to the title is: it depends which singer you ask. The earliest documented version says brothel, in a girl's voice.
How a Girl's Song Became a Boy's Song: Van Ronk, Dylan, The Animals
The Animals, a band from Newcastle, England, took the song to No. 1 in the UK, the US, and Canada in 1964 — and they learned it from Bob Dylan's 1962 debut album. Dylan had taken his arrangement from Dave Van Ronk, a mainstay of the New York folk scene, who had made the singer male. In three steps — Van Ronk to Dylan to The Animals — a Kentucky girl's warning became a British band's hit about a ruined young man, and that is the version the whole world now knows.
It is the folk revival running in reverse: an American mountain ballad crossing the Atlantic eastward and coming home as rock and roll. Our post on Black Velvet Band shows a documented crossing in the usual direction, an old ballad from Ireland and England carried to Australia. And our other American guest, Jolene, is paired with this one — both are songs we play whose real stories are American, told straight. The blog's Moonshiner post covers another song the revival carried everywhere.
To follow the whole journey, read Appalachian History's interview with Ted Anthony, whose book Chasing the Rising Sun tracked more than 400 versions of the song; the book itself is on the Internet Archive. As related viewing, Inside Irish Music's The Song Bob Dylan "Stole" From Ireland covers the Dylan-and-borrowing story from the Irish side — not a source on this song, but the same Atlantic traffic, seen from the other shore.
— hear us play it live (video above).