"The Roses Won't Tell Your Secret"...

Good Thursday morning, all bodies!

That old matchbox has got me going again, but there's not much time to address that hole in my pocket today... Kinda!

The other day I accidentally knocked over a "Licorice Pizza" crate that held old 45's I've collected over the years. Lots of memories fell out of that box though one that didn't was "Sally Go Round The Roses."

A friend of mine, Bob Guza, and I would often go to our favorite restaurant of the month in LA and talk music... in depth. I loved it so much. No one has been able to talk music, except one person here in New Orleans, like Bobby could. 

Sometimes we'd get on a kick about one song or another and analyzing it ad nauseam and then go searching for the song trying to be the first one to find the elusive vibe and purchase it. To beat him finding this record I had to go home to New Orleans and pay $25 at Russell's on Magazine Street in the Irish Channel. 

"Sally Go 'Round the Roses" was quite unlike other pop songs of the day especially coming from a "girl group" in 1963. It had a mysterious, ominous, almost hypnotic musical quality with weird and rather perplexing lyrics. The song has the same mysterious feeling that Bobby Gentry's, "Ode To Billy Joe" has. 

"Sally Go 'Round the Roses" meaning could be interpreted as a conventional song of heartbreak over a love affair or over cheating. 

"Sally don't you go, don't you go downtown
Sally don't you go-oh, don't you go downtown
Saddest thing in the whole wide world
Is to see your baby with another girl"

But the music intimates a deeper more sinister happening than that and Bob and I had many discussions over the possibilities. A drug deal gone bad, illegitimate child, a death or suicide of a friend or ex-lover? 

Of course, as a part of our mindset nowadays, there's the homosexual aspect of the tune that is fun to speculate but has never been proven. We will never know because the writers of the song, Zell Sanders and Lona Stevens (Spector), have long since passed away and never commented one way or the other.

"Sally go round the roses (Sally go round the pretty roses)
They won't tell your secret (they won't tell your secret)"

BTW, I did find my copy in another 45 "Licorice Pizza" crate.

First cup, y'all!

Copyright 2017/ Ben Bensen III