A song heard by legendary songwriter Bob Dylan inspired him to go electric, but he faced some resistance from an artist who had already recorded it.
Though Dylan featured The House of the Rising Sun on his debut, self-titled album, it was not until The Animals’ version came out that Dylan decided he would use electric instruments. His cover of the song had featured on Bob Dylan, and was the album closer for Dave Van Ronk’s Just Dave Van Ronk release in 1964. The Animals’ version of the song released just months before Van Ronk’s version, which can be heard at the end of his Just Dave Van Ronk album. But Dylan had approached Van Ronk to ask his permission to use it before revealing he had already recorded a version.
Van Ronk, speaking in the No Direction Home documentary, confirmed Dylan had approached him and, when told he could not use it, simply replied “uh oh”. Van Ronk said: “I had learned it sometime in the 1950s, from a recording by Hally Wood, the Texas singer and collector, who had got it from an Alan Lomax field recording by a Kentucky woman named Georgia Turner.
“I put a different spin on it by altering the chords and using a bass line that descended in half steps — a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers. By the early 1960s, the song had become one of my signature pieces, and I could hardly get off the stage without doing it. Then, one evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in.
“He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague.
“Everything was going fine and, ‘Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’ Oh, shit. ‘Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?’ A long pause. ‘Uh-oh.’ I did not like the sound of that. ‘What exactly do you mean, “”Uh-oh””?’ ‘Well’, he said sheepishly, ‘I’ve already recorded it.'”
Dylan’s encounter with The Animals’ version of the song apparently inspired the songwriter to use electric instruments for the first time. A post to the r/TodayILearned subreddit reads: “When Bob Dylan first heard The Animals’ version of The House of the Rising Sun on his car radio, he stopped to listen, jumped out of his car and banged on the bonnet. It later became one of the reasons why he went electric.”
John Steel, the long-serving drummer of The Animals, claims it is their version which inspired Dylan to ditch folk music and instead focus on electric.
Dylan has since spoken of the song and his reason for recording it. In the book, Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song, he confirmed his recording was thanks to Van Ronk’s version.
He said: “I’d never done that song before, but I heard it every night ’cause Van Ronk would do it. I thought he was really on to something with the song, so I just recorded it.”
