House of The Rising Sun
As a master mason might gaze in wonder at the Taj Mahal; as a first-rate popular song writer might listen enthralled to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky; I found by accident one day in 2000 while working as a reporter, the best feature story I ever read, written by an Associated Press writer I’d never heard of named Ted Anthony.
You’re probably saying, “Who?” That’s how it is with wire service writers — they usually remain pretty anonymous to everyone but their peers. But Ted Anthony is different, because his story of how the song “House of the Rising Sun” broke out of a mountain holler in Kentucky to become known all over the world is a work of sublime art — the featury story as all journalism schools tell students a feature should be written.
Why? Well, for one thing it precedes from the microcosm — a 16-year-old Kentucky girl named Georgia Turner recording an obscure old song on a Library of Congress Presto “reproducer” in 1937 in her tiny home town — to the macrocosm. The song which “spread like a cold” (Anthony’s phrase) after being placed into a songbook would eventually be recorded by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Josh White, The Weavers and Bob Dylan, and finally, in the version most people nowadays recognize, by The Animals in 1964.
No one knows for sure who wrote “Rising Sun,” which in general is about a house of ill-repute, Anthony explained. It is believed to be based on old English folk songs, but no author’s name has ever surfaced. Georgia Turner didn’t know; she had just sung it from girlhood on up.
After recording the song, Georgia Turner went back to her life, Anthony wrote. She eventually moved to Michigan, raised 10 children, and died of emphysema at age 48 in 1969. End of story? Hardly.
Anthony spent many, many hours on the trail of “Rising Sun”‘s odyssey. One day just a few years ago, he played a recording of Georgia Turner, singing the song on that day in 1937 in Middlesboro, Ky., for a man named Reno Taylor, in a diner near Detroit.
Taylor listened impassively for a while. Then, he began to smile. After all, that was his mom, singing as a 16-year-old, all those many years ago.
A young GI loved Frijid Pink’s version while serving in the Vietnam War. Gillis Turner never suspected that the first recorded version of the song had been by his Aunt Georgia.
But I’m talking mostly about Georgia Turner. This was supposed to be about Ted Anthony’s beautiful story. He must have had to spend months and months, traveling and interviewing dozens of people, to compile it. He takes a thousand strands and pieces and fits them together, the master writer, to make a beautiful, moving story about the journey of a song and the young mountain girl who sent it on its way.
To be outstanding, a story should not only have a good lead, or opening paragraph, but also a good ending, a rounding off that leaves the reader with a feeling of closure, of completion.
Listen to Ted Anthony’s lead to the story of “Rising Sun” and Georgia Turner:
“She’d sing it wherever she went in those days — around the neighborhood, hanging the wash outside her family’s wooden shack, and especially when folks would gather to play some harmonica, pick some banjo and push the blues away. Everyone knew the song was old, though they weren’t sure where it came from. But in 1937, around Middlesboro’s desperately poor Noetown section, it came from the mouth of the miner’s daughter, the girl named Georgia Turner.”
Now, after many many paragraphs telling of the song’s journey, of how ubiquitous it has become, of how many world-renowned singers have performed it, listen to Anthony’s summing up:
“If you listen just right, you can hear the chorus that came before. Clarence Ashley and Roy Acuff and Doc Watson are singing; so are Woody Guthrie and Josh White and Lead Belly, each long gone. The Weavers are harmonizing. Eric Burdon is belting out his lead. Germany’s Toots Thielemans is manning the mundharmonika.
“And you can hear, too, the miner’s daughter from Middlesboro who never asked for much and never got much in return. Georgia Turner, dead and silent for 31 years, is still singing the blues away.”
If Ted Anthony’s story, “The House of the Rising Sun,” doesn’t leave you stunned and goose-pimply, mister and ms., then you probably don’t like fried chicken, either.
I was so impressed by the story that I contacted the AP for Ted Anthony’s e-mail address. By that time, he was the AP bureau chief in Beijing, China. I e-mailed him, telling him what an astounding achievement I thought the story was. Never got a reply. But that’s OK. He’s probably heard that so many times by now that it’s become routine to him.
Anyway, Ted Anthony, wherever you are nowadays, this one’s for you. This old ex-reporter has read (and written) a lot of feature stories in his time, and “Rising Sun” was the absolute best.
Old Corporal <corporalko@yahoo.com>
“House of the Rising Sun”, – Saturday, August 09, 2008 at 21:29:28 (EDT)
