Song Information
Title: Give My Love to Rose
Artist: Johnny Cash
Writer: Johnny Cash
Original Release Date: December 1957 (as a B-side to “Home of the Blues”)
Label: Sun Records
Genre: Country
Notable Recordings: Also included on the 1960 compilation Sings Hank Williams and re-recorded for American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002).
Awards: Posthumously won a Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 2003.
Song Summary
“Give My Love to Rose” is one of Johnny Cash’s most heartbreaking and human songs. Told from the perspective of a dying man who has just been released from prison, the lyrics recount his final moments after collapsing near a railroad track. As he lay dying, he meets a passerby and asks this stranger to carry a message to his beloved wife, Rose, and his son.
The man tells his life story in just a few verses—how prison tore him away from his family, how he longed to be reunited, and how he was never able to reclaim the time lost. With his last breath, he asks the stranger to give his love to Rose and tell her that he died thinking of her.
Johnny Cash delivers the song with a somber, measured voice that captures the pain of regret, love, and finality. The simplicity of the music—typically just Cash’s voice and guitar—mirrors the stark and raw emotions of the narrative. The story within the song is powerful, not only as a tale of personal tragedy, but as a reflection of countless real-life families broken by incarceration and distance.
Explaining the Deeper Meaning
At first listen, “Give My Love to Rose” might sound like a simple farewell from a man to his family. But within its few short verses, the song tackles profound themes of injustice, love lost to time, the cost of crime, and the power of redemption.
The man in the song is not asking for forgiveness from society—he’s pleading for connection with the ones he loves most before he dies. His request is simple, but the emotional weight behind it is immense. He’s not just passing on love; he’s passing on the remnants of a life interrupted. His prison sentence did not just remove his freedom—it robbed his wife and child of a husband and father.
Johnny Cash, who had his own battles with the law and addiction, was known for his empathy toward prisoners and outcasts. He often sang for inmates and championed criminal justice reform. This song reflects his deep understanding of the loneliness and longing that plague those behind bars, as well as their families.
“Give My Love to Rose” isn’t about crime. It’s about love’s endurance, even when time and bars have separated it. It asks us to consider the emotional cost of punishment—and whether love can ever truly bridge that distance.