If you saw the Statler Brothers on stage, you knew who Harold Reid was. He had the deep bass voice at the bottom of every harmony and the quick wit that kept the crowd laughing between songs. Comedy was so much a part of the group that his brother Don Reid later said it was mostly because of Harold.
But in 1970, the song that saved the Statler Brothers’ career had nothing to do with comedy. It was “Bed of Rose’s,” and Harold Reid wrote it by himself.
A Group That Needed a Hit
The Statler Brothers came from Staunton, Virginia. Harold Reid started the group as the Four-Star Quartet in 1948 with his boyhood friends Lew DeWitt, Phil Balsley and Joe McDorman. They sang mostly gospel. Don Reid, Harold’s younger brother, later took McDorman’s place. After touring with Johnny Cash in the mid-1960s, they moved into country music.
The big break came with “Flowers on the Wall,” written by Lew DeWitt. It spent a month at No. 2 on the country chart in 1965 and became a pop hit too. The group followed it with two more Top 10 country hits in 1967.
After that, things slowed down. Three singles in a row failed to reach even the top half of the country chart. By 1970, the Statler Brothers had left Columbia Records and signed with Mercury, where they were paired with producer Jerry Kennedy. Their first Mercury single would show whether the move was a fresh start or the beginning of the end.
The Song Harold Reid Brought In
That first single was Harold Reid’s “Bed of Rose’s.” The group recorded it in September 1970 and released it in October.
The story is simple and direct. A teenage orphan in a small town is left to beg on the street. The respectable churchgoing townspeople pass him by. The only person who takes him in is Rose, a streetwalker nearly twice his age. As the years go by, the two outcasts become lovers, and the town looks down on both of them.
Harold Reid did not turn Rose into a saint, and he did not turn the town into villains. He just put the two side by side: the people who called themselves good, and the woman they had already judged. The song asks the listener to decide which of them actually showed mercy.
Even the title is a joke with a point. “A bed of roses” means an easy, comfortable life. The apostrophe turns it into something else entirely: the bed belonged to Rose, and her life was anything but easy. That kind of wordplay was typical of the Statler Brothers’ writing.
A Bold Choice for a Gospel-Rooted Quartet
For a group that had grown up singing in churches, this was a daring song to release. uDiscover Music later called it “not uncontroversial.” There is no record that the Statler Brothers backed away from it. Lew DeWitt sang the story, and Harold Reid’s bass held the bottom of the harmony.
How It Did on the Charts
“Bed of Rose’s” entered the Billboard country chart on November 21, 1970, at No. 71. In a twist the songwriter probably appreciated, it arrived the same week as George Jones’s “A Good Year for the Roses.”
From there it kept climbing. Over a 17-week run, the group’s longest since “Flowers on the Wall,” it reached No. 9 in early 1971. It crossed over to No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100, the Statler Brothers’ first pop chart appearance since their debut hit. In Canada it went all the way to No. 3 on the country chart. The album, also called Bed of Rose’s, reached No. 5 on the country albums chart.
More importantly, the song started a new chapter. The Statler Brothers followed it with eleven more Top 10 hits through the 1970s, many of them written by Harold Reid and Don Reid, including “Do You Remember These” and “The Class of ’57.” Harold Reid also went on to create the group’s comic alter ego, Lester “Roadhog” Moran, leader of the hopeless Cadillac Cowboys.
A Song That Kept Being Sung
Other artists picked up “Bed of Rose’s.” Tanya Tucker recorded a slightly changed version on her 1974 album Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone). Irish singer Daniel O’Donnell included it on his 1990 album Favourites. Years later it found a new, younger audience on K-Rose, the classic country radio station in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
The version with the most personal meaning came from Harold Reid’s own family. His daughters, Kim Reid and Karmen Reid, sang together as a duo in the 1980s and recorded their own version of their father’s song, working with Jerry Kennedy, the same producer who made the original.
The Funny One Who Wrote the Serious One
Harold Reid died on April 24, 2020, in Staunton, Virginia, at 80. He was a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. The Statler Brothers’ website remembered him in one line:
“His singing, his songwriting and his comedy made generations happy.”
All three are true. But “Bed of Rose’s” shows something the jokes sometimes hid. The man who made audiences laugh paid close attention to how people treat each other. He wrote the song that saved his group’s career about a woman nobody in town would defend, and he defended her.