House of the Rising Sun

At the risk of getting called a baby-boomer by my wife, I am putting this song up. This is one of those songs that will get me to test the capacity of my stereo speakers every time. If my stereo went to 11, I would go there. Best rock adaptation of a folk song ever. (Note that this is different from a folk-rock song). The fact that the original is essentially a blues tune helps. This song also demonstrates that sometimes less is more. This is a really simple guitar line, but any thing more would wrong. It's shocking to see how young these guys were. That bass growl coming out of that baby face.

My only complaint with this version is that they changed the pronouns. This is a woman's song, the House is a whorehouse, and the song doesn't make sense when sung from a male perspective. Following The Animals in a Bob Dylan singing with female lyrics and Joan Baez singing as a female, of course.

On YouTube there is much discussion about the "real" version. For the record, the Baez version was recoded in 1960, the Dylan version in 1961, and The Animals in 1964. The song is older than all of them, of course. It was one of the many songs collected by Alan Lomax. The oldest known recording was made by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster in 1933. Prior to the 1960's versions were recorded by Roy Acuff, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Glenn Yarbrough.

The Animals



Bob Dylan



Joan Baez



Woody Guthrie



Leadbelly

Shipwrecks

Some shipwrecks become famous, while others become forgotten. Some like the Titanic capture the imagination and inspire multiple works of art. Others remain famous because of the works of art they inspired. Although the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was one of the largest ships to ever sail the Great Lakes, it would not be a famous as it is without the great Gordon Lightfoot song. The USS Reuben James was the first US Navy ship sunk during World War II. It was sunk more than a month before Pearl Harbor by a German U-Boat while on convey duty off of Iceland. It, however, was one of many destroyers sunk on convoy duty. It too would be largely forgotten without the Woody Guthrie song.

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is quite simply one of the best story songs ever written. If Gordon Lightfoot had never written another song, he would still be an important songwriter on the basis of this song alone. Hell, just the line "Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?" would qualify him as great writer.

This video is the best of many I found. It combines contemporary news footage, the actual radio transmissions of the searchers, archival footage of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and footage of the wreckage itself.



I found fewer videos of "The Sinking of the Reuben James". I chose this one because the singer's voice has a quality similar to Woody Guthrie's. When Woody first wrote a song about the Reuben James, he wrote a version that included the names of all 85 crew members that were lost. He was convinced that this was too monotonous and so he used the "Tell me, What were their names" chorus instead. When I first was thinking about this post I wanted to find and list the names of all the dead on both ships. The video for the Edmund Fitzgerald list the names of her men. I could not find a listing for the men lost on the Reuben James. In an ironic twist, I did find a list of the men who served on the U-Boat that sank the Reuben James.