YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS
SONG & HIT DETAILS
Artist Name: MITCH MILLER AND HIS ORCHESTRA
Hit Month (Australia): January 1958
Song Author: The author is unknown
Record Label: Coronet
Label Number: KS-006
SONG PROFILE
The Yellow Rose of Texas
Published 1858
“The Yellow Rose of Texas” is a traditional folk song.
The original love song has become associated with the legend of “how a slave named Emily Morgan helped win the battle of San Jacinto, the decisive battle in the Texas Revolution.”
The Center for American History at the University of Texas has an unpublished early handwritten version of the song, perhaps dating from the time of the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836.
The author is unknown; the earliest published version, by Firth, Pond and Company of New York and dated September 2, 1858, identifies the composer and arranger as “J.K.”; its lyrics are “almost identical” to those in the handwritten manuscript, though it states it had been arranged and composed for the vaudeville performer Charles H. Brown.
The soundtrack to the TV miniseries James A. Michener’s Texas dates a version of the song to June 2, 1933 and co-credits both the authorship and performance thereof to Gene Autry and Jimmy Long.
However, Don George (‘I’m Beginning to See the Light’) reworked the original version of the song, which Mitch Miller made into a popular recording in 1955 that knocked Bill Haley’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock” from the top of the Best Sellers chart in the U.S.
Minstrel versions (1858)
There’s a yellow rose in Texas that I am going to see,
No other darkey knows her, no darkey only me;
She cried so when I left her, it like to broke my heart,
And if I ever find her we never more will part.
(Chorus)
She’s the sweetest rose of color this darkey ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew,
You may talk about your Dearest May, and sing of Rosa Lee,
But the yellow rose of Texas beats the belles of Tennessee.
Where the Rio Grande is flowing, and the starry skies are bright,
She walks along the river in the quiet summer night;
She thinks if I remember, when we parted long ago,
I promis’d to come back again, and not to leave her so.
(Chorus)
Oh! now I’m going to find her, for my heart is full of woe,
And we’ll sing the song together, that we sung so long ago;
We’ll play the banjo gaily, and we’ll sing the songs of yore,
And the yellow rose of Texas shall be mine for evermore.
(Chorus)