I am the featured blogger on the first and second Wednesdays of each month on the Blogger platform for Western Fictioneers and Prairie Rose Publications. I’m reposting truncated versions of those articles for my Hello, Friday! posts on those two weeks.
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The tragic lost love country ballad for November on the Western Fictioneers’ blog is Give My Love to Rose by Johnny Cash.
Give My Love to Rose was written by Johnny Cash. He recorded and released it in 1957. It was the “B” side of his single Home of the Blues. In 2002, Cash re-recorded Give My Love to Rose, which garnered him his fourth Grammy Award.
According to Cash, he came up with the basic idea for the song after having had a conversation with an inmate at San Quentin State Prison. The prisoner had asked Cash to give a message to his wife. From there, Cash wrote the story of a released convict traveling home to reunite with his wife and son. The former prisoner is either terminally ill or somehow injured, and he collapses along the railroad tracks. The song’s narrator finds him, listens to the dying man’s last requests, and presumably conveys that message to his family.
Until we meet again,
I grew up with parents listening to Johnny Cash. It was nice to learn more about him here.