“Little Rosa” by RED SOVINE & WEBB PIERCE               Decca 29876 

Written by Red Sovine & Webb Pierce        Produced by Owen Bradley

Released July, 1956                                 Peak position: #5 Country 

            You’d be hard pressed to find a more tear-inducing record than this one. I mean, someone dying is one thing, but hit by a train? And it’s a little girl? The only daughter of a low-income immigrant? Tailor-made tragedy, but someone must have experienced this in real life for Sovine and Pierce to write about it.

               A little background first: Woodrow Wilson Sovine (1918-1980) became noted for his morality tales, usually involving truckers, and most commonly done as recitations, but not until his career resurrection in the 1960s. Webb Pierce (1921-1991), a Country Music Hall of Famer who only contributes vocal at the beginning and end of this record, was possibly the hottest artist in country music through the 50s. Having Pierce’s vocal guaranteed airplay, and what the two put together was a masterpiece of manipulation.

               When Webb sings his opening line “Little Rosa was her name,” you figure this Rosa isn’t around to tell her own story, but not much else is given away in that vocal section. Then it’s Red’s turn, and he begins telling, in first person, of walking around a graveyard to visit a deceased friend and coming across a man placing a single red rose on a small grave and weeping. He starts consoling the man, “and in his broken English, this is how he told (his story) to me.”

               No matter that the accent Sovine affects is one of the most unconvincing ever attempted, not even certain whether it’s supposed to be Italian or Mexican. Rosa could be a name in either language. In spite of that, you do get a picture of the man he’s talking about. Turns out the man is a rail worker who had been to the florist earlier, asked how much for one red rose, the proprietor frowns and says a dollar. Then a young blonde lady walks in, asks how much for a red rose, the man smiles and says ten cents. The only discrepancy so far is that the man actually hung around long enough after being rebuffed to witness the blond beauty being offered the lesser price. That he didn’t just storm out when the florist told him it was a dollar or at least say “Are you out of your frigging mind” is hard to believe. It was 1956, a dollar could still buy you a full dinner.

             The man asks the florist why the price variation, the florist acquiesces a bit, and offers “if you tell me why you want the rose, (maybe) I’ll give it to you for naught,” so he tells his tale of woe. Seems he only makes 3 dollars a day working for the railroad, but has his daughter Rosa always greeting her papa when he comes home from a hard day. Then one day, Rosa’s not there, and he looks over to the railroad tracks, and sees a crowd gathered. He pushes them aside, and there lays his Little Rosa. What he doesn’t say was something like what was used in the death song parody, “I Want My Baby Back,” i.e. “And there was Little Rosa… and over THERE was Little Rosa … and way over THERE etc.”   

            He tells the florist he’s getting the rose to put on Little Rosa’s grave, and “Man he don’t-a say naught, but pick-a the biggest-a red rose he could-a find and handed it to me, and I say, ‘Thank you, boss. Thank you!’” Sovine’s voice dissolves into tears, but hell, the listener has already been gotten by the time he discovers Rosa’s body, so anything else after that is just piling it on. There’s nothing left but for Pierce to come in with a one-verse eulogy and close with a drippy steel guitar riff, the same way the song begins.

            Two things we’re not told here: 1) How old was Rosa, though obviously not very, but more importantly 2) There’s never a mention of a mother. The man never says he’s a widower, divorcee, or single dad. You’re led to believe that Rosa just sat at home alone between the end of school and Papa coming home. Certainly if a mother figure was around, the chances of Rosa wandering by the tracks would have been less. With family laws the way they were then, it was very rare that a male working parent was allowed sole custody of a child, and it certainly wouldn’t have been awarded to an immigrant in a low-pay manual labor job. But then, Sovine has the floor, and there’s nobody to interrupt his tale (except maybe Pierce or whoever else was in the studio) and say, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t check out.” 

             Sovine almost topped himself in the tear-jerk stakes with “Teddy Bear,” which capitalized on the Citizen’s Band radio craze. The story line here involved a paraplegic boy whose daddy was a trucker killed in an accident. He gets on the CB to express his one wish, which is to ride in a big rig, and by the end of the song, there’s a whole convoy at his house. It’s odd too, that while it was a #1 country record in 1976, at the height of the CB mania, it hit #6 in England in 1981, by which time the only place you saw CB’s was at yard sales. It was also two years after Sovine was killed from having a heart attack while driving his Ford van and crashing into a tree. None of the above makes any sense.

              “Little Rosa” is available on “Red Sovine – 20 All-Time Greatest Hits” (2002, Tee Vee Records), but the version included in that compilation is one of several re-recordings he did over the years, minus Pierce. The recitation remains pretty much the same, though. There is also a vintage black & white performance of him on YouTube doing the song on Porter Wagoner’s syndicated TV show. 

    http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/little-rosa/id201013867?i=281070981