Rose Garden (Lynn Anderson song)

"Rose Garden" was the title of a song written by Joe South, that is best known as recorded by country singer Lynn Anderson. Her October 1970 release topped the U.S. country chart for five weeks, reached the No. 3 spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop chart and hit number one on both Record World's pop and country singles charts. The song was additionally a major pop hit internationally, enjoying topping the charts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway and hitting the top three in the United Kingdom.

Lynn Anderson version

The Lynn Anderson single was her third release for Columbia Records in 1970, after several years of recording for Chart Records. The single proved the be the first crossover record of her career.

"Rose Garden" was originally an album cut by the song's writer, Joe South, in 1969. Several other male vocalists recorded it on albums including Freddy Weller and Dobie Gray but it was never a hit until Anderson's version. A recording by the girl group The Three Degrees, best known for their 1974 hit, "When Will I See You Again", also predated Lynn Anderson's hit version.

Anderson wanted to record the song but her producer (and husband) Glenn Sutton felt it was a "man's song", in part because of the line "I could promise you things like big diamond rings". According to Anderson, Sutton agreed to record the song as a potential album cut when there was still session time left after her scheduled session. Rearranging the song to a more uptempo, light-hearted melody, Sutton and everyone in the studio was impressed with the results, including Columbia Records executive Clive Davis, who deemed the song worthy of a pop release as well as being a country single. Shortly after its breakthrough on American top 40 radio, the song became an international hit. A cover version released by Sandi Shaw in England ultimately failed to chart as the original quickly became a major success there.

Several artists recorded cover versions of "Rose Garden" on their albums following Anderson's hit in the early 1970's including Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, Dottie West, Carol Burnett, Jim Nabors, Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Ray Coniff, Percy Faith, Ralna English, Norma Jean (singer), Dinah Shore and others.

The song became Anderson's signature tune and one of the biggest hits of the 70s in any genre of music, and went on to earn her a "Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance" in 1971, as well two Grammy nominations for Joe South: one for "Best Country Song" and another as "Song of the Year" in the pop field.

Lynn said, "I believe that 'Rose Garden' was released at just the right time. People were trying to recover from the Vietnam years. The message in the song — that if you just take hold of life and go ahead, you can make something out of nothing — people just took to that."^[2]

After her Columbia heyday Lynn Anderson recorded new performances of the song several times for post-1982 albums, including a bluegrass version that was featured in her 2004 comeback album The Bluegrass Sessions. This album earned Anderson her first Grammy nomination in over thirty years.

The song's chorus from Anderson's original version was sampled by the pop/dance group Kon Kan in their similarly titled song "I Beg Your Pardon," released in 1988. This track proved to be one of the biggest dance club hits of the late 1980's and went on to hit the top 15 on the Hot 100. Additionally, the song's chorus has also been sampled in Canadian Hip-Hop artist Shad's song of the same name "Rose Garden", released on his critically acclaimed 2010 album, TSOL.

Chart performance

k.d. lang & The Reclines version

Canadian country pop singer k.d. lang and her band The Reclines covered the song for their 1987 album Angel with a Lariat. The single was lang's first release in the United States but failed to chart.

Martina McBride version

In 2005, Martina McBride included the song on her album of covers, Timeless. This album featured classic country songs from over the years, including "Rose Garden". The song was released as a single and enjoyed only modest success and proved to be one of McBride's less successful songs of this period on the charts. Billboard magazine unfavorably compared McBride's remake to the Anderson original however both performers happily performed the song as a duet on several occasions.

Chart performance

References