Artifacts, costumes memorializing the career of Grammy-winning “Rose Garden” vocalist Lynn Anderson will be available at a June Nashville estate sale.
A three-bedroom home in West Nashville’s Belle Meade neighborhood contains priceless country music artifacts belonging to a pair of Grammy winners and a female singer-songwriter who achieved the rare feat of writing six top-50 country hits a year in the 1960s.
Given Music City’s recent housing boom, it isn’t odd that Nashville-native Lisa Sutton is proudly standing in front of the million-dollar property to advertise an estate sale of clothing and other treasured personal effects that belonged to her legendary mother, Lynn Anderson.
However, a front yard rose garden and intricate rose vine detailing on a wrought iron handrail lead into a living room filled with museum-ready items from Manuel Cuevas, head designer of Nudie Cohn’s legendary rodeo wear business. Rhinestone-festooned cowboy boots and glittering gowns worn during performances at the Country Music Association Awards, the Grand Ole Opry and “The Lawrence Welk Show” adorn clothing racks that feel like they number in the dozens.
This is the home of Grammy-winning songwriter Glenn Sutton and the multitudes of performance pieces belong to his former wife Anderson, a rodeo queen turned Grammy-winning country star and singe of the 1971 hit “Rose Garden.” Lynn Anderson’s parents — Lisa Sutton’s grandparents Casey and Liz Anderson — were also known for their work with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, including 1967’s “I’m A Lonesome Fugitive.”
Many of Anderson’s effects will be available for sale at a Cowgirl Couture Sale at 4503 Shys Hill Road on May 31 and June 1 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.lynnandersonrosegarden.com.
Lisa Sutton celebrating and preserving country legacies
“It feels like I’m living in a treasure box,” Lisa Sutton says. She’s walking through the home’s garage where her mother’s CMA Fan Fair autograph booth signs are stored. Upstairs in an attic, there is a replica of the dress her mother wore on the “Rose Garden” album cover — the original is behind glass at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Sitting behind a brown leather loveseat on top of a small black wooden cabinet are Lynn Anderson’s 1971 Best Female Country Vocal Performance Grammy for “Rose Garden” and Glenn Sutton’s 1967 Grammy for Best Country & Western Recording for “Almost Persuaded,” which he co-wrote with Billy Sherrill for David Houston.
If your eyes had blinked or drifted to the intricately crafted wooden quarter horse, 14-hands tall and covered in roses and an iridescent saddle, you could easily have missed them. It’s that type of house.
“I’m a proud Nashville native who grew up living and surrounded by country music history,” Lisa Sutton. Yes, after her mother died in 2015, she helped curators organize a yearlong exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2017.
For the past five years, though, Sutton’s been hard at work attempting to regain ownership of her family’s song rights.
The Copyright Act of 1976 allows a songwriter or their descendants to reclaim the rights to their works written before 1978 that were transferred to a publisher or other entity.
Related, Glenn Sutton is a Nashville Songwriting Hall of Famer who counts Tammy Wynette’s hits “I Don’t Wanna Play House” and “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” plus Jerry Lee Lewis’ “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)” among his classics. Liz Anderson also achieved a dozen top-10 hits, including Haggard’s “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive.”
Lynn Anderson’s multiple ways of ushering in country’s first crossover era
Notably, between 1967 and 1972, Lynn Anderson and her then-husband, David Sutton, possibly represented the core of the surge in the country music industry’s mainstream popularity.
Lynn was a former rodeo queen and North Dakota native who parlayed her talent, beauty and authenticity into regular appearances on Welk’s variety show. Less than five years after making her debut on the program, she moved to Nashville. She married a songwriter renowned for his work as a harmony- and strings-loving composer with eventual Country Music Hall of Famer Billy Sherrill. Within 18 months, she was a Grammy-winning performer.
Glenn was a proponent of a smoothed-out, yet still wholly countrified and orchestral-driven sound aimed at adult-contemporary-leaning tastes in the wake of the era’s psychedelic rock boom.
By the mid-1970s, the duo’s work helped to make America’s music business a billion-dollar industry. Anderson also became a Country Music Association vocalist of the year, the first female country singer to sell out Madison Square Garden and once performed for President Jimmy Carter at Ford’s Theatre. “Rose Garden” was also named the unofficial theme song for the Marine Corps after the Vietnam War.
Lisa Sutton fervently believes that her mother’s couture-driven fashion presentation, underpinned by the lucrative “countrypolitan”-style music she released, allowed for mainstream high fashion styles like Jane Birkin-adored “darling” dresses, plus creators like Las Vegas’ Suzy Creamcheese, Bianca Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor-favored Halston to open a still-traversed inroad for cutting-edge pop culture to take hold alongside Nashville’s country traditions.
“We’re still seeing it now, with the Kelsea Ballerinis, Megan Moroneys, Carrie Underwoods and Lainey Wilsons of the world and what I see them singing and wearing,” Sutton says, smiling.
Country and western culture’s ‘authentic’ roots remain in artifacts
“Purchasing my mother’s artifacts is like buying a piece of working history,” Sutton says. “Unlike other artists, country music stars who were able to achieve a career like my mother’s for five decades, endured often changing in horse trailers at rodeos and sometimes crying while getting dirty and sweaty in all types of weather conditions — the hard work just wasn’t on award show red carpets and at arenas or the Grand Ole Opry.”
The rewards of a mother who released 50 albums worth of material and a father who recorded multiplatinum albums and singles and won not just Grammys, but BMI and ASCAP awards, are also present. Items autographed by everyone from Emmylou Harris and Wynonna Judd to Charley Pride and John Prine are spotted throughout the home, interspersed with hand-crafted rhinestone jewelry procured during barnstorming western tours of casinos on Native American reservations.
In 1977, at the age of 30, Anderson divorced Sutton. She was briefly remarried to Louisiana-born horse breeder Harold Stream. They divorced in 1982.
As much as her early years were defined by country music, her later years were defined by consistent touring and owning, breeding, or riding 12 national champion horses and eight world champions at the American Quarter Horse Association Congress.
When holding and viewing Anderson’s artifacts, there’s something authentically rooted in the country and Western culture’s numerous, varied traditions that is readily apparent.
“The sweat that changed the patina of mom’s clothing is about as authentic as anything you’ll still see from these eras in country music,” Lisa Sutton says.
‘I like the fairy tale thing … I like the happy ending’
Though not yet inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the past decade has seen the “Rose Garden” singer inducted into the International Western Music Association and the National Cowboy Museum’s Hall of Great Western Performers.
In 2018, the country industry’s Woodlawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Nashville — the final resting place of George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Porter Wagoner among many others — created the Lynn Anderson Rose Garden, consisting of over 100 hybrid tea rose bushes.
Upon opening the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s 2017 exhibition in her honor, the organization’s CEO, Kyle Young, said , “Lynn Anderson’s television background and her ability to bring show-business dynamism to recordings and concert performances helped her achieve crossover success.”
A quote from a 2012 interview perhaps sums up the simple elegance and broadly connective joy that she used to approach her career and life.
“I like the fairy tale thing. I like the happy ending. That’s the way I live.”