I didn’t know I would feel such sadness and stirring emotion but then again I didn’t know that we were going to get news that Lynn Anderson had passed away. But the unexpected always works that way and surfaces feelings inside that we aren’t always conscious of but come to find are deeply ingrained.
It was almost instantaneous that when word got out of Vanderbilt that Lynn had suffered a fatal heart attack, I heard something trigger in my head as if a dormant playlist suddenly turned on. “I beg your pardon,” It was the first line of her most famous song – and one of the defining songs of a golden age of country. “I never promised you a rose garden/Along with the sunshine there’s gotta be a little rain sometime.” They were the words of Joe South and a lesson in brilliance in how to begin a hit song with its chorus.
“Rose Garden” was one of the records I heard over and over on WABC in New York. I carried the sense of anticipation of buying the single, then called a 45 into my record store. I probably bought a bunch of songs that day, counting out the single dollar bills I’d earned from cutting lawns and delivering newspapers to support my growing habit of music. When the clerk handed it to me from behind the counter, I remember the bright red circle and black lettering on the record from Columbia Records.
I can’t say I was a real country fan then but the enormity of this single was so much that it was a hit record I had to have. That it was on Columbia, home of Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, made it even more important. One of the producers was Clive Davis, the head of the label. I’d soon be reading his autobiography “Inside The Music Business” and watch him make hit records for decades to come eventually founding Arista Nashville and bringing on Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, Pam Tillis and Brad Paisley.
Anderson’s presence was so dominant that she became the first female country artist to go platinum. Tammy Wynette’s Greatest Hits would achieve the same feat but when Anderson was nominated Country Music Association’s Female Country Music Vocalist of The Year and won in 1971, she ended Wynette’s three-year winning streak. Over her lifetime she had nearly fifty top 40 hits including three number one albums. She was Billboard’s Artist of The Decade between 1970-1980.
When Johnny Cash chose Anderson to be his duet partner on “I’ve Been Everywhere,” a song featured on his album The Greatest Duets, he posed a simple question: “Ok, where you been?” That prompted Anderson to go on a rant, naming about twenty cities, states, provinces and countries in rapid succession during an exhaustive twelve seconds in which she didn’t have time to come up for air, her list dissolving into illegible syllables for a brief moment before hitting the key line. “I’ve been everywhere.”
And surely she had. On being the first female artist to sell out Madison Square Garden in 1974, she looked back with some perspective when speaking with Markos Papadatos in Digital Journal. “Yeah, I rode a horse down Broadway and posed in front of the marquee. I was the first country artist to do that. Before Big & Rich rode a horse that crossed a bridge, I did that a long time ago,” she told Papadatos who added that she said it with a sweet laugh.
The recent years weren’t too kind to Anderson. Her life seemed to be caught up in a series of bizarre incidents and tabloid headlines that seemed more like a Lifetime screenplay than something befitting a country legend and a once award-winning equestrian voted California Show Horse Queen as a teenager.
But this year things seemed like they were turning around. Anderson released her first album in over ten years, a country gospel album called Bridges. “This album is all about the gap between country and gospel and taking that step that I’ve taken to become that member of the church,” Anderson told Emily West for Brentwood Home Page. She’d undergone her own spiritual conversion, being baptized in the Rio Grande near where she lived in New Mexico.
The process of trying to connect with a younger fan base and generation that grew up after her hit records, had already begun in some ways with her appearance on a project also called Bridges, a collection of duets put together by the young Oklahoma singer Mary Sarah. The almost improbable album was sparked in part by the nineteen year-old’s desire for her friends and contemporaries to discover traditional country music, something prompted by questions from her high school friends who would ask “Who is Merle Haggard? Who is Willie Nelson?”
Mary Sarah remembers thinking to herself, “‘Oh my gosh these people are legends and you don’t even know who they are.’’’ She was able to attract these and other legends like Ronnie Milsap, Vince Gill, Ray Price and Dolly Parton to duet with her. The album pairs Anderson with Mary Sarah on a faithful remake of “Rose Garden.”
Mary Sarah’s ghostly resemblance and understanding of the country pop lexicon Anderson helped invent is coupled with the resilience and soulfulness of the singer herself who reinterprets her younger self. When Mary Sarah made her Ryman Auditorium debut on the Opry Country Classics night in 2014, it was with Lynn Anderson and the Oak Ridge Boys in honor of the late Ray Price.
Haggard, along with singers like Buck Owens and Freddie Hart, were some of the people who used to stay at Anderson’s house when she was growing up in Sacramento, California. Anderson’s parents were the country songwriters Casey and Liz Anderson and the singer talked about waking up in the middle of the night to hear them in her house after they played concerts in the area.
Under normal circumstances, we would be revering and celebrating her stellar comeback album. The album’s centerpiece is a song her longtime boyfriend Mentor Williams wrote in the early Seventies and was made popular by Dobie Gray and covered by countless others including Rod Stewart, Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton who once sang it with Anne Murray on her variety show. Williams rewrote it for the couple’s church in Taos, New Mexico and turns around the rock and roll as redemption themed chorus for a higher power in the new gospel incarnation. “Give me my heart boy/you free my soul/I want to walk down those streets of gold/and drift away.” She sings “Get Up Joseph” with the Oak Ridge Boys, a song based on a dream when an angel told Joseph to take Jesus and flee to Egypt to escape King Herod who was going to search and destroy him.
Anderson once talked about how “Rose Garden” was about making something out of nothing. “You take it and go ahead. It fit me well and I’ll be proud to be connected to it until I die.” The power of such a simple idea sung over a few minutes helped blaze a trail for women in country that has influenced several generations since. In remembering Anderson it seems so ironic that we are doing so in a time when the issue of the day is about the lack of women being played on country radio. Anderson was so dominant in her time that it makes it feel like we’ve regressed that much more.
After news broke, I turned to the Friday night Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast to try and find some solace and community. Anderson had performed on the show back in 2005 with Martina McBride when they did a duet of, you guessed, “Rose Garden.” It was already a sad week as earlier we had gotten news of the passing of pedal steel guitarist Buddy Emmons.
Larry Gatlin, the show’s host for the night, wove in a mention about how Emmons was the best steel player and that we lost Anderson who had crossed over to the other side of the river. Tonight she would be singing in Heaven. I kept expecting what he’d say next but Gatlin was on to his next subject, talking about how he had just been on Fox and Friends to play a song he wrote with Billy Dean.
The mention seemed inadequate and given what she meant to the country community, warranted more than a talking point, especially when so many listening were trying to get over the shock and the emptiness that death always brings – and that inescapable feeling that when it comes, it always comes too soon.
Originally posted here.
