Clarence Earl McCurry, known professionally as Clarence and Tom Ashley, was an Appalachian singer and banjo player whose repertoire included many ancient Appalachian and early American songs, and he was the first to record “House of the Rising Sun.” Born in Bristol, Virginia, on a date he reported as Sept. 29, 1895, though the 1900 Census shows 1893, he grew up in his maternal grandfather's boarding house in Shouns, Tennessee, near Mountain City, adopted the surname Ashley, and came to be called Tom from his grandfather's nickname Tom Tiddy Waddy. He learned many songs from relatives and boarding house residents, played banjo primarily and also guitar, and at age 16 joined Doc Hauer's traveling medicine show, where music and comedy helped sell dubious miracle cures to often isolated communities; among the show's artists he mentored was the future “King of Country Music,” Roy Acuff. Ashley recorded in February 1928 in Richmond, Indiana for Gennett as Thomas Ashley, began recording that October for Victor with the Carolina Tar Heels, recorded for Columbia in Johnson City as Clarence Ashley, and in 1931 recorded with the Blue Ridge Mountain Entertainers for the American Record Corporation. Across these affiliations he featured songs that later became classics during post-World War II folk revivals, including “Dark Holler Blues,” “The Coo Coo Bird,” “Little Sadie,” “Naomi Wise,” “The House Carpenter,” “Old John Hardy,” “Greenback Dollar,” “Short Life of Trouble,” “Corrinne, Corrine,” and “Rising Sun Blues,” later known as “House of the Rising Son,” a No. 1 hit for The Animals; some of these songs were of Anglo-Celtic origin, some were American ballads, and some had African-American roots, while his barbed vocals and forceful banjo playing drew heavily upon African-American influences. He remained on the medicine show circuit until 1943, later worked many jobs including coal mining, and continued to perform with his own bands and with other artists including Charlie Monroe and the Stanley Brothers, but he was nearly inactive in music when folklorists Eugene Earle and Ralph Rinzler found him at a fiddlers festival in Union Grove, North Carolina. After learning that “The House Carpenter” and “The Coo Coo Bird” had been included on the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, he quickly embraced a reborn career; Rinzler produced Old Time Music at Clarence Ashley's, featuring the then unknown Doc Watson, and Ashley began appearing at coffee houses and folk festivals in North America and Europe, appeared at Carnegie Hall with Pete Seeger in December 1962, and had just been offered a second English tour when he died on June 2, 1967.