Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Memphis" by Johnny Rivers.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Erratum

A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands' surname as Land.

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks  by Sean Egan.

The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn't actually their complete recordings -- for that you'd also need to buy the Decca recordings -- but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode.

For the information on Dylan's first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period.

I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin.

Transcript

Today we're going to look at a song that, more than any other song we've looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We're going to look at "House of the Rising Sun", and the career of the Animals:

[Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"]

The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other.

The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you're not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it's a very isolated city.

Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there's a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here.

Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities -- Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles.

But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it's another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do.

This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain's culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you're in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, a