Chasing the Rising Sun by Ted Anthony

Author:Ted Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Everywhere

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear … each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.

—WALT WHITMAN, “I HEAR AMERICA SINGING”

Voices from nowhere and voices from the larger towns …

—JOHN MELLENCAMP, “R . O.C.K. IN THE U.S.A .”

The Animals’ arrangement rippled out into a world of musical genres that had been and were still evolving, blending, and globalizing in ways never before considered. The British Invasion was steaming forward. Delta Blues and Appalachian folk were being cannibalized and reworked into hard rock, soul, rhythm & blues. In Vietnam, GIs fighting the war blasted rock music from radios in the jungle, sending the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and Creedence Clearwater Revival through the Mekong Delta. The Beatles went to India with the Maharishi, and the sitar, for a micromoment in history, echoed across the rock landscape.

And “House of the Rising Sun”? Artist after artist claimed it and reshaped it. Disco. Country rock. Jazz. Cajun. Elevator music. German tango and harmonica. In South Africa, singer-activist Miriam Makeba sang it as an apartheid-era lament. The hard-rock band Frijid Pink cut a version that a young serviceman named Gillis Turner grew to love while serving in Vietnam, and had no idea it was connected to his Aunt Georgia back in Middlesboro, Kentucky. “I think,” he says, “that everybody who’s had a bad day can relate to that song.”

In the decades since, Billy Joel has sung it in concert. Jerry Garcia, two years before he died, cut a rambling, warbling 1993 version with David Grisman and Tony Rice on a jam CD called The Pizza Tapes. Reggae artist Gregory Isaacs brought it into his genre with a “vocal mix,” a “wicked dub mix,” and a “slightly dubful vocal mix.” Musicians from everywhere, with all manner of unusual names and styles, have contributed renditions—from Nixon Grin (Denver, hard alternative rock) to Sex Mob (New York City, jazzy funk) to the Pork Dukes (Witham, England, early punk) to Crazy Otto’s Ragtime Band (Germany, oompah).

It has been appropriated into hip-hop, a collage-driven genre that relies upon the reinterpretation of music that came before. When Wyclef Jean used the melody of “House of the Rising Sun” in the background and added Haitian lyrics for the moody 1997 song “Sang Fezi,” Georgia Turner’s old song was enlisted to explore the themes of police mistreatment and cultural identity in New York City. Wyclef even got Lauryn Hill to sing a couple verses to the tune:

Then you should know that one day we are gone

so keep your head to the sky.

See the path we refuse

is the path we should choose.

You can’t take the world when you die.

It’s not limited to hip-hop. For more than a generation, we have lived in an age of engulfing collage. More than ever, quotations—printed, visual, aural—help us tell our stories. Something happens in our lives, and someone says, “That’s like in Seinfeld when George and Elaine …” The entire history of human endeavor has become one vast pool of potential citations—items and

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