I just want to take the time to say that Youtube is great. I mean, seriously... it's great. I mean, it sucks that you have to sit through ads on half the videos, and then suffer endless pop-ups on them as well--and it sucks when those ads prevent them from loading properly, but STILL. I just spent the past few hours watching videos--not just anything, but rather various versions of The House Of The Rising Sun, and it just blows me away how I can pretty much trace the development of the song and hear multiple versions of it in an hour when it would have taken me ages of careful and calculated collecting to do so in the 90's.

I was playing around with my record player and some old 45s--and one of the 45s happen to be The Animals version of the song. So I took the 45 and played it on the 33 1/3 setting, which essentially slows down the song and sometimes drastically changes the overall mood of the song. For this--it didn't necessarily change the haunting tone, but it did make the vocals sound like some centuries-old shaman trying to rid my soul of the devil. It's really kind of excellent.

That is, of course, because the version The Animals has is just brilliant. And it kind of pisses me off that some 22 year olds could put something out this assured and affecting.



And then I saw this version--which predates the Animals version by a couple of years. And although I thought I had listened to Dylan's debut a couple of times, I can't remember ever hearing this, because it's just as good. Not as haunting, but definitely more hopeless. Also, thanks to this, learned that the Animals version changed the gender of the narrator--which I didn't know because I am an idiot.



And *apparently* Bob Dylan stole this arrangement from a guy named Dave Van Ronk--who was forced to quit playing the song because everyone assumed *he* was stealing it from Dylan. Then apparently, Dylan had to stop playing the song because people assumed he took it from The Animals, quite ironically. This was all on a clip from the No Direction Home documentary. But instead here's Mr. Van Ronk's version. It took a while for me to get used to his singing--but it's nonetheless quite impressive.



I don't want to bore anyone by posting every single version of the song that ever existed--but that's what I'm going to do. I don't know. I guess I find it interesting in the way that folk/blues standards sort of develop and evolve when different musicians get their hands on said song. HERE'S THE FIRST KNOWN RECORDED VERSION OF THE SONG.



Here's a completely different take.



Here's one that is set to the lyrics of Amazing Grace.



And here's some crappy versions of the song. One's crappy because they were drunk while recording it, the other sucks because they're kind of a crappy band that I like nonetheless. Try to guess which one's which.