Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday’s Zippy, continuing a series about a ventriloquist’s dummy:

A burlesque of “The House of the Rising Sun”.

On the original, from Wikipedia:

“The House of the Rising Sun” is a traditional folk song, sometimes called “Rising Sun Blues”. It tells of a life gone wrong in New Orleans; many versions also urge a sibling to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version, recorded in 1964 by the British rock group The Animals.

The 1964 recording can be viewed here.

The two verses parodied here:

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one

Well, I got one foot on the platform
The other foot on the train
I’m goin’ back to New Orleans
To wear that ball and chain

(Common meter: four lines of iambs, alternating tetrameter and trimeter: 8.6.8.6. With the 2nd and 4th lines rhyming, An enormous number of texts — “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Amazing Grace”, for example — can be sung to this tune.)

This entry was posted on November 17, 2015 at 7:34 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parody, Poetic form. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.