Forty-eight years ago, Amanda McBroom sat at a piano and composed a ballad in just 20 minutes. The song The Rose has stood the test of time.
Sitting at the same piano recently, she played The Rose for an audience of two — me and her four-legged friend named Chubby.
"I was on the Ventura freeway," McBroom recalled of writing the song. "I'm driving home as carefully as I can, just saying the lyrics coming through my head over and over and over again. And I ran through the living room, and [my husband] George was watching football. I said, 'I can't talk to you right now!' I ran in and sat down at the piano, and it came out. And then I asked him if he would come listen to it.
He looked at me and he said, 'You just wrote a standard.' I said, 'Don't be silly. Nobody's gonna hear it but friends at a Christmas concert when we've had too much to drink.' He said, 'No, mark my words, something's gonna happen to this song.' And as usual, he was right," she said with a laugh.
The song went on to become famous when it was featured in the 1979 film of the same name, starring Bette Midler.
"That was another divine accident," said McBroom. "I was a singer, but I wasn't a songwriter. And that this girl that I met was a professional songwriter. She called me up and she said, 'Listen, there's this movie coming out called The Rose. Do you want us to submit your song?' And I said, 'Sure,' so I gave him this cheesy little cassette. They submitted it. The music supervisor said, 'This is the one.' And Bette liked it, so that's how it wound up in the movie."
While Midler’s version is the definitive one, many artists have covered The Rose.
Does McBroom have a favorite version?
"Bette [Midler] I bless every day," she said. "But apart from Bette, a duet version that I did with Vince Gill [is my favorite]."
"Conway Twitty was the first person to do a cover back in Nashville, and it was so interesting to hear it for the first time in a man's voice," said McBroom.
"When it went into the film Napoleon Dynamite, that brought it to a whole new [audience] and and then it was on Family Guy. So it's been spread around, which makes me very happy," said McBroom.
"It's a poem. It's a hymn. It doesn't have a hook. It doesn't have a bridge," McBroom explained. "Seeing how it has resonated with so many people worldwide, which just blows my mind. People ask me, 'Aren't you tired of singing this song?' No! I love singing that song. You know, it's a healing for me too whenever I sing it."
Now, she’s performing a benefit concert, alongside baritone Douglas Ladnier, supporting the Ojai Art Center.
"The arts will save us. To me, especially music, but any theater, any of them, they are our better selves. They [the arts] are the mirror that we can hold up to the world and say, Look at yourself. The beautiful part, the hideous part. Without the arts, we're dead," said McBroom.
Benefit concert, A Magical Evening of Music: Amanda McBroom with Douglas Ladnier is this Friday night at the Ojai Art Center.
She'll also perform a holiday concert on November 30 at the Majorie Luke Theater.
