“The Bramble and the Rose” was written by Barbara Keith, a singer-songwriter born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, who recorded it on her second self-titled solo album for Reprise Records (the album with Lowell George, Spooner Oldham and Pete Kleinow among the studio players, produced by Larry Marks). The album was withdrawn soon after release and sold little, but several other writers and singers picked songs from it, and this was one of them.
The lyric is addressed to a partner. The two have been as close as a pair of candles, with every danger outside and known by name, and now they have hurt each other without meaning to. The image of the title is the answer: love grows like the bramble and the rose, winding around each other, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind. The last verse asks for an embrace and a true love song to sing together.
Mary McCaslin covered it, and the Smith Sisters put it on their 1989 Flying Fish LP Roadrunner. In bluegrass it was recorded by the Lynn Morris Band, who made it the title song of their 1992 Rounder album The Bramble & the Rose, recorded at Bias Recording in Springfield, Virginia, with Lynn Morris on lead vocal and guitar, Tom Adams on banjo, Peter McLaughlin on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Marshall Wilborn on bass. Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin recorded it in 1993 on Our Town (Rounder), and Patty Loveless included it on Mountain Soul II in 2009.
