Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys
Will the Roses Bloom
Single: Preachin’ Prayin’ Singin’ (1952) Bluegrass Discography
“Will the Roses Bloom” appears on the Skaggs and Rice duet album from 1980, the version associated with this entry. The album — recorded by Ricky Skaggs and Tony Rice as a brother-duet-style recording in conscious dialogue with the older Bill and Charlie Monroe and Carter and Ralph Stanley duet traditions — is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive duo recordings in modern bluegrass.
The song is credited to I. Bevins and J. Bevins — members of the gospel-song publishing community whose exact identities are not firmly established — and it entered the bluegrass canon through the Foggy Mountain Boys’ recording. The song belongs to the older Southern-gospel-and-revival tradition. The lyric is a heaven-and-eternity piece: the singer wonders whether the roses will bloom in the next world as they have on earth, with the conceit using the natural-image-as-eternal-question framing that runs through 19th-century revival hymnody.
The song’s authorship is not consistently documented in the publicly available discographic sources for this particular track; the Sugar Hill liner notes are the firmest reference for the writer attribution. Skaggs’s tenor harmony with Rice’s lead vocal — with the spare guitar-and-mandolin instrumental backing — gives the recording its signature intimate texture. It works as a moderate-tempo gospel duet feature in G with a strong harmony slot on the chorus refrain.