日升之屋 (?)

"The House of the Rising Sun" is an American traditional folk song, sometimes called "Rising Sun Blues". It tells of a person's life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans. Many versions also urge a sibling or parents and children to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version, recorded in 1964 by the English rock band The Animals, was a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and in the US and Canada. As a traditional folk song recorded by an electric rock band, it has been described as the "first folk rock hit".

The song was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, but probably has its roots in traditional English folk song. It is listed as number 6393 in the Roud Folk Song Index. In June 2026, CBS News included the song in its list of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.

Origin and early versions

Origin

Like many folk songs, "The House of the Rising Sun" is of uncertain authorship. Musicologists say that it is based on the tradition of broadside ballads, and thematically it has some resemblance to the 16th-century ballad "The Unfortunate Rake" (also cited as source material for "St. James Infirmary Blues"), yet there is no evidence suggesting that there is any direct relation. The folk song collector Alan Lomax suggested that the melody might be related to a 17th-century folk song, "Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave", also known as "Matty Groves", but a survey by Bertrand Bronson showed no clear relationship between the two songs.

Traditional English

Lomax also noted that "Rising Sun" was the name of a bawdy house in two traditional English songs, and a name for English pubs, and proposed that the location of the house was then relocated from England to the US by Southern performers. In 1953, Lomax met Harry Cox, an English farm labourer known for his impressive folk song repertoire, who knew a song called "She was a Rum One" (Roud 2128) with two possible opening verses, one beginning

The recording Lomax made of Harry Cox is available online. (Cox provides the alternative opening verse with the "Rising Sun" line at 1:40 in the recording.) It is considered extremely unlikely that Cox was aware of the American song. It is also lent credence by the fact that there was a pub in Lowestoft called The Rising Sun and by the fact that the town is the most easterly settlement in the UK (hence "rising sun"). Doubt has been expressed as to whether Cox's song has any connection to later versions.

France

Folklorist Vance Randolph proposed an alternative origin related to France, in which the "rising sun" might refer to the sunburst insignia dating to the time of Louis XIV, which was brought to North America by French immigrants.

Earliest American versions

"House of the Rising Sun" was said to have been known by American miners in 1905. The oldest published version of the lyrics is that printed by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925, in a column titled "Old Songs That Men Have Sung" in Adventure magazine. The lyrics of that version begin:

The oldest known recording of the song, under the title "Rising Sun Blues", is by Appalachian artists Clarence "Tom" Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it on September 6, 1933, on the Vocalion label (02576). Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather, Enoch Ashley, who got married around the time of the Civil War, which suggests that the song could have been written years before the start of the 20th century. Roy Acuff, an "early-day friend and apprentice" of Clarence Ashley's, learned it from him and recorded it as "Rising Sun" on November 3, 1938.