One Red Rose

It’s interesting how sometimes a song can sleep in your psyche for years, virtually forgotten, and then suddenly something brings it back into your memory, maybe something you see or something someone says or maybe even just a dream. It was several decades ago that our old bandmate, the late Roger Samples, got so enamored of a beautiful little John Prine tune called “One Red Rose.” Well, this was in the early 1980s, just as Rog was ending his time with The Flood, the band he’d helped form nearly a decade earlier. He and the family would soon be moving from West Virginia to the green hills of Mount Sterling, Ky., so we never really worked out a full arrangement of the tune, and honestly we’d forgotten about the song, or thought we had. And then a few weeks ago, Charlie says he woke up grinning from a sound sleep because literally in a dream he’d heard Roger singing that song again, just as a clear as a bell. We’ve been doing lately at rehearsals, and now whenever we play it, it’s like a little three-minute reunion with our old friend.