NEWLY REMASTERED VERSION: September 14, 2015
[original release date and track notes: October 17, 2013]
Like a reanimated corpse in eerie Indiana, my mojo's back and rising with a haunted katHouse tale for your Halloween party mix! The back story on my arrangement here: I had recorded the guitar, bongos and lead vocal several weeks earlier. Then last week in the middle of the night while my mojo was still in slo-mo, the Muse visited and sang into my ear the haunting strains of Big Brother & the Holding Co.'s "Summertime" intro. Immediately clear to me that a takeoff on this theme would open up my rendition of "House of the Rising Sun." And, much as I echoed Marty Robbins' "El Paso" in my "El Preso" cover, you'll also hear a musical allusion to Gershwin's "Summertime" melody in the first verse.
Given the song's setting, I decided on New Orleans brass and Dixieland reeds for delivering the Holding Co. riff, but not until I started layering the sections for the intro did I begin to hear a dirge, a NOLA street funeral procession, which evolved into this unique take on the classic folk ballad: The singer has recently died, and her spirit is accompanying her casket as it moves down the street, wailing of and warning against all the wrong turns her too brief life has taken. By the time the organ part enters, the marching band and casket have arrived at the brothel for the wake. And it is there, back in the House of the Rising Sun, where the singing ghost will remain to haunt the House and its patrons ever after.
Something else I'm doing in this arrangement is loosely tying the characters to specific instrument lines. No "Peter and the Wolf" scope mind you, but mother is the clarinet, father is the trombone, baby sister's the flute, and as the singer/narrator, I am the high French whor—I mean, HORN! ;>
[Heard here Oct. 30, 2014:
wfmu.org/playlists/shows/57901]
released September 14, 2015
Arrangement, performance and production engineering by Kathleen "kat330" Martin
Artwork: "Funeral March" by Charles Caryl Coleman, adapted with song title and spirit by JT Lindroos