Every­one knows the song, a warn­ing from a man or woman return­ing to the place that will destroy them. Yet they can­not turn back. The tragedy of “House of the Ris­ing Sun” lies in its inevitabil­i­ty. “The nar­ra­tor seems to have lost his free will,” writes Jim Beviglia, caught, per­haps, in the grip of an unbeat­able addic­tion. As soon as we hear those first few notes, we know the sto­ry will end in ruin. But what kind of ruin takes place there? Is the House of the Ris­ing Sun a broth­el or a gam­bling den, or both? Was it a real place in New Orleans? Maybe a pub in Eng­land? Or a place in the anony­mous songwriter’s imag­i­na­tion?

Eric Bur­don and the Ani­mals, who pop­u­lar­ized the song world­wide when they record­ed and released it in 1964, did­n’t know. Even Alan Lomax could­n’t suss out the song’s ori­gin, though he tried, and sus­pect­ed it may have orig­i­nat­ed with an Eng­lish farm work­er named Har­ry Cox who sang a song called “She Was a Rum One” with a sim­i­lar open­ing line.

Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan played “House of the Ris­ing Sun” in cof­fee­hous­es. Bur­don him­self picked the song up from the Eng­lish folk scene, and the Ani­mals first cov­ered the slow, sin­is­ter tune when they opened for Chuck Berry because they knew they “could­n’t out­rock” the gui­tar great.

“House of the Ris­ing Sun” has been record­ed by Lead Bel­ly, Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone, Dol­ly Par­ton, and vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er artist con­cerned with Amer­i­can roots music. “It’s so deep in the heart of this cul­ture,” says New Orleans gui­tarist Reid Net­ter­ville, who finds that peo­ple from all over the world know the lyrics when he plays the song on street cor­ners. Since the Ani­mals’ record­ing, it has become “one of the sin­gle most per­formed songs in music his­to­ry,” notes Poly­phon­ic in the video at the top, “with ren­di­tions in every genre you can think of, from met­al to reg­gae to dis­co.”

Maybe audi­ences around the world con­nect with this tale of ruin and despair because its set­ting is so mys­te­ri­ous and yet so per­fect­ly placed. Bur­don him­self, who vis­its New Orleans often, gets invit­ed to all sorts of strange places in the city, he says, pur­port­ing to be the tit­u­lar “House”: “I’d go to wom­en’s pris­ons, coke deal­ers’ hous­es, insane asy­lums, mens’ pris­ons, pri­vate par­ties. They just want­ed to get me there.” The ambi­gu­i­ty between the real and the sym­bol­ic makes the song adapt­able to any num­ber of dif­fer­ent kinds of voic­es. “It’s been described as an abstract metaphor but also a ref­er­ence to real his­tor­i­cal places,” notes Poly­phon­ic, and it’s gone from the lament of a “ruined” female nar­ra­tor to a dis­solute male voice with only a change in pro­nouns.

While there may be a hand­ful of spu­ri­ous claimants to the title of real House of the Ris­ing Sun, the ori­gin of the song remains unknown. But its allure is not a mys­tery. The house is “a place of vice, a place of dark­ness and fore­bod­ing” — a place that we both can’t seem to resist and that we’d do best to stay clear of. We’ll always have curios­i­ty about the dark cor­ners of the world; the warn­ing of “House of the Ris­ing Sun” will always be per­ti­nent, and moth­ers, often trag­i­cal­ly to no avail, will always tell their chil­dren about it, wher­ev­er and what­ev­er that den of sin may be.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

B.B. King Explains in an Ani­mat­ed Video Whether You Need to Endure Hard­ship to Play the Blues

Stream 35 Hours of Clas­sic Blues, Folk, & Blue­grass Record­ings from Smith­son­ian Folk­ways: 837 Tracks Fea­tur­ing Lead Bel­ly, Woody Guthrie & More

Aretha Franklin’s Pitch-Per­fect Per­for­mance in The Blues Broth­ers, the Film That Rein­vig­o­rat­ed Her Career (1980)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

By the time the Bea­t­les fin­ished The White Album, it seemed they might not ever make anoth­er record togeth­er. “The group was dis­in­te­grat­ing before my eyes,” record­ing engi­neer Geoff Emer­ick remem­bers. “It was ugly, like watch­ing a divorce between four peo­ple. After a while, I had to get out.” Emer­ick left, but thank­ful­ly the band hung in a while longer and man­aged to patch things up in the stu­dio to make their final record.

When they called Emer­ick to work on Abbey Road, they promised to get along for what would turn out to be their last album. (Emer­ick points out that on the cov­er they’re walk­ing away from Abbey Road stu­dios.) Not only did they man­age to avoid per­son­al con­flict, but more impor­tant­ly “the musi­cal telepa­thy between them was mind-bog­gling.” As if to seal the moment of accord for­ev­er, they end­ed the album, and the Bea­t­les, with a med­ley.

Abbey Road shows every mem­ber of the band ris­ing to their full song­writ­ing poten­tial, espe­cial­ly George Har­ri­son, who ful­ly came into his own with “Some­thing,” a song every­one knew would be “an instant clas­sic.” Har­ri­son became more con­fi­dent and talk­a­tive in inter­views, sit­ting down on the day of Abbey Road’s release with Aus­tralian music writer and John Lennon friend Ritchie York to offer his impres­sions of each track.

In the enhanced audio inter­view above, Har­ri­son briefly com­ments, track-by-track, on what he thinks of each song and the album as a whole. What is per­haps most inter­est­ing, giv­en Emer­ick­’s com­ment about “musi­cal telepa­thy,” is how the music seems to come from some­where else, a kind of intu­ition or chan­nel­ing that tran­scends the indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties of each Bea­t­le.

Take Ringo’s “Octopus’s Gar­den,” a song Har­ri­son loves. “On the sur­face,” he says, “it’s just — it’s like a daft kids’ song. But the lyrics are great, real­ly. For me, y’know, I find very deep mean­ing in the lyrics, which Ringo prob­a­bly does­n’t see, but all the things like… ‘We’ll be warm beneath the storm.’… Which is real­ly great, y’know, because it’s like this lev­el is a storm, and it’s always — y’know, if you get sort of deep in your con­scious­ness, it’s very peace­ful. So Ringo’s writ­ing his cos­mic songs with­out notic­ing!”

The genius of Lennon, says Har­ri­son, comes through par­tic­u­lar­ly in his tim­ing, “but when you ques­tion him as to what it is, he doesn’t know. He just does it nat­u­ral­ly.” As for the album as a whole, Har­ri­son says, “it all gels, it fits togeth­er and that, but… it’s a bit like it’s some­body else, y’know?.… It does­n’t feel as though it’s us.… It’s more like just some­body else.”

Har­ri­son does­n’t say much about the record­ing process, but he does talk about the song­writ­ing and influ­ences on the album. When he wrote “Some­thing,” he says, he imag­ined “some­body like Ray Charles doing it.” He calls Paul’s “Maxwell’s Sil­ver Ham­mer,” which Lennon hat­ed, an “instant sort of whis­tle-along tune” that peo­ple will either love or hate.

The con­ver­sa­tion even­tu­al­ly moves to Har­rison’s feel­ings about The White Album and oth­er top­ics. Where he real­ly opens up is near the end when the sub­ject of India comes up. We see him walk­ing away from Abbey Road on his own path. When York asks him about “the Indi­an scene,” Har­ri­son replies, “I dun­no, it’s like it’s kar­ma, my kar­ma.… I’m just pre­tend­ing to be, y’know, a Bea­t­le. Where­as there’s a greater job to be done.”

Hear the inter­view in full above and read a tran­script here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Har­ri­son “My Sweet Lord” Gets an Offi­cial Music Video, Fea­tur­ing Ringo Starr, Al Yankovic, Pat­ton Oswalt & Many Oth­ers

Watch George Harrison’s Final Inter­view and Per­for­mance (1997)

Watch Pre­cious­ly Rare Footage of Paul McCart­ney Record­ing “Black­bird” at Abbey Road Stu­dios (1968)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness