Lynn Anderson & Patsy Cline The Christmas Album (CD)

Lynn Anderson

Rose Garden - recorded 10 September 1970 at the Columbia Recording Studio, 804 16th Avenue South, Nashville, Tennessee. Arranger: Cam Mullins; producer: Glenn Sutton. With Lynn Anderson (vocal), Jerry Kennedy (guitar) and Charlie McCoy, among others; overdubs were probably held at a later date (Columbia 4-45252, master NCO 108 673).

Joe South produced and wrote songs for the Atlanta-based pop singer Billy Joe Royal. From Down In The Boondocks onward, Royal gave voice to South's words. I Never Promised You A Rose Garden was originally a filler song that South wrote for Royal's 1967 album 'Hush' (itself a South song covered by Deep Purple), and Royal raced through it at a disconcertingly fast tempo. In 1968, South buried Rose Garden on an album of his own. South, who died in September 2012, rarely talked in any depth about his songs, but it is likely that a couple of his best-known titles were spurred by book titles: his biggest hit, Games People Play, shared its name with a pop-psychology book by Eric Berne, and I Never Promised You A Rose Garden echoed Hannah Greene's 1964 novel about a young woman's descent into mental illness.

One person who heard South's Capitol LP was Lynn Anderson, the daughter of Liz Anderson, who had written Strangers and Lonesome Fugitive for Merle Haggard. In 1969 Lynn married Billy Sherrill's assistant and occasional co-writer Glenn Sutton, and in 1970 Sutton signed her to Columbia. When Sutton had produced her earlier records for Chart, Anderson asked him to consider Rose Garden, but he refused: he felt lines such as 'I could promise you things like big diamond rings' would not work sung by a woman to a man. On 9-10 September 1970 she recorded her first Columbia LP together with a Christmas single, and she recalled that Rose Garden was cut almost as an afterthought, as one of the last songs on the slate. She remembered Jerry Kennedy and Charlie McCoy coming up with the Rose Garden shuffle - a rhythm Kennedy had used on his own 1964 single The Blue Beat, itself based on Millie's ska hit My Boy Lollipop.

Columbia president Clive Davis walked in on the mixing session and immediately fixated on Rose Garden. His enthusiasm may be what led Sutton to overdub a string arrangement by Cam Mullins for a dramatic intro. Davis later wrote that the crossover potential seemed obvious and that he flipped out, while Billy Sherrill thought it merely a solid country hit. Davis ordered his field promotion men to hand-carry the record to pop stations, and by his account Rose Garden sold three million singles and one million albums; the song was omnipresent. "I believe that 'Rose Garden' was released at just the right time," Anderson said later. "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."

- Colin Escott (from Various - Country & Western Hit Parade 1970)

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