Ramble On Rose

Americana at it's best.......enough cultural references to choke a horse.....a shuffling trip through the american experience. puts the listener right in the song!

its about moving away from your problems, but still once u get away the grass still isn't greener and the wine still isn't sweeter.

Regardless of what it's about it's a lovely song

Rose is born to ramble. She is chasing down a destination unknown. The grass is always greener on the other side until you get there, but the urge to keep moving is always there.

I have to agree with hohw89: This song is about what Bob Dylan used to call "the old, weird America." As far as I know, no other white American popular music act of the latter half of the 20th century, outside of Dylan himself (and perhaps the late, great John Prine, whose emphasis was more contemporary) captured that vanished America better than the Grateful Dead. The America of patent-medicine con artists traveling town to town, leaving before the locals discover that their cure-all elixirs are worthless. The America of traveling carny shows, of women on the run from checkered pasts and abusive men, hoping to find just one man good and true. The America of Indigenous nations shattered by white greed and violence, of down-and-outers, rural and urban, of every race, color, and background, of desperadoes escaped from prison or the latest heist-gone-wrong, hoping for one decent night's sleep in a barn or a rain-drenched back alley before heading out on the run again, one step ahead of the law. The America always on the run from its past, much of it evil and indefensible (250+ years of slavery), hoping for redemption and a newfound, or made-up, innocence.

The picaresques and shady but charismatic characters depicted in "Ramble On Rose"- Shelley and her Frankenstein, Crazy Otto, the gladhanding evangelist Billy Sunday, the enigmatic Rose herself, rambling on but looking for some place, any place, she might finally settle down, and all the others- all belong in this tradition. And no other band has evoked the horror, the beauty, the despair, and the hope of these characters as The Dead did. Will they find what they're looking for? Will they ever settle down easy? "The grass ain't greener, the wine ain't sweeter, either side of the hill"- pretty fatalistic at first. But still they ramble, never giving up.