#leadbelly

Rock Island Line (Railroad Song) - Lead Belly

1942

Nothing but rhythm and rails

Smithsonian, National Postal Museum United States Postal Service june 1998

Leadbelly - House of the Rising Sun

Nina Simone - The House of The Rising Sun

Odetta Live in concert 2005, "House of the Rising Sun"

The Animals - House Of The Rising Sun

Full Disclosure: I put the Animals last, because that's usually the only version people know.

I picked the others because of their differences. I grew up with both the Leadbelly and the Animals version playing in my house. The Leadbelly's a good representation of some of the oldest versions and shows what it sounded like before the Animals did their radical rearrangement. The Nina Simone is iconic and really different. The Odetta is a good representation of what some of the later versions that reclaimed the women's perspective lyrics do and is frankly beautiful in itself.

I love all of these. Each one makes the song their own. This is no shade on the versions I didn't pick. If we played every recorded version this would take forever.

There are way more versions than are presented here. No one really knows exactly how old this song is and there is some debate even about whether it's about a brothel, gambling den, etc. since by the time people started recording it there were versions with different ruins including male and female versions.