Songfacts®:

• The house that Jack built is a sad place filled with bizarre characters doing bizarre things for no apparent reason. Even the place's sadness is inexplicable.
  
  The song's lyrics are very much a product of the late '60s, when some degree of surrealism was sort of an unspoken requirement, whether or not that surrealism actually added anything to the song. This was the '60s counterculture, fueled by LSD, and the music was expected to be at least mildly slanted in some way to meet the tilt of the generation's heads.
• There are some Biblical allusions in "The House That Jack Built."
  
  And looks through colored glass at the dark spots on the sun
  And Mary, she believes that her mother was a queen
  Keep saying you just missed him, King Solomon has just been
  
  King Solomon was an ancient King of Israel that appears not only in the Bible's Old Testament but also in the Islamic Quran and Hadiths. His mention suggests that the Mary of these lyrics is either Mary, mother of Jesus, or Mary Magdalene. Whichever it is (or neither), there's probably not cause to dig too deeply into it. Price himself has said that there was nothing serious in the lyrics.
  
  In an interview with Keith Altham (New Musical Express, August 19, 1967), he said, "The idea for the melody was in my head for a long while, but I could not think of a lyric. Georgie Fame has this kind of trouble with his compositions. I think it proves that we're musicians first and vocalists second. Anyway, I finally decided to make the lyric as ridiculous as possible. It's really just nonsense poetry about all the daft things that people do!"
• This song was important to Price's artistic development. He had his first big break as the original keyboardist and founding member of The Animals, who were not only commercially successful but were also highly regarded by their peers. After going solo in 1966, he had some UK charting hits with covers of "I Put A Spell On You," Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo," and "Simon Smith And His Amazing Dancing Bear."
  
  With "The House that Jack Built," he wrote his own song from scratch, lyrics and all, for the first time.
  
  "I worked really hard on 'The House That Jack Built,'" Price told Altham. "The recording costs of that single and tracks for my new LP virtually wiped out the profit we made on 'Simon Smith.'"
• Considering Price's English roots, this song was almost certainly a play on the British nursery rhyme of the same name.
  
  The House That Jack Built nursery rhyme was first published in 1755. It's highly unlikely that the matching titles are just coincidence. The nursery rhyme version, as well, doesn't seem to make sense. It's just one silly thing stacked on top of the other.
• At the end of his New Music Express 1967 Price interview piece, journalist Keith Altham makes an interesting observation: "It might also be pointed out that some careful attention to the lyrics of 'The House That Jack Built' might make more sense that at first apparent."
  
  This comes after a long (relative to the total length of the piece) discussion about Price's unsavory view of the "flower children," meaning the "hippies" as they're better remembered today - the longhaired anti-establishment folks who wanted to bring down the "system." Price didn't think very highly of their protestations and thought they should be grateful to live in a country that gave them the freedom to speak their minds.
  
  Looked at in the larger context, Altham seems to be implying that "The House That Jack Built" is about the '60s generation itself, with everybody doing whacky things for no apparent reason and building a sad, pointless house in the process. This goes against Price's own claim that the song isn't about anything, but it's still a qualified opinion from an inside source.
• This is the opening track on Price's second studio album, A Price on His Head.