Rose Room

1918 sheet music cover
Art Hickman's Orchestra playing "Rose Room" c.1919.

"Rose Room", also known as "In Sunny Roseland", is a 1917 jazz standard, music by Art Hickman, lyrics by Harry Williams. It is almost always performed as an instrumental. Composed at a time when the popularity of ragtime was fading in favor of thirty-two-bar form and twelve-bar blues songs, the song has been called "definitely ahead of its time" by composer Alec Wilder. Indeed, while popular in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the song enjoyed its biggest popularity during the swing era.[1] The song was named after the Rose Room in St. Francis Hotel, where Hickman was playing at the time.[2] In 1914, jazz pioneer Bert Kelly was a member of Hickman's band.

  1. ^ Chris Tyle: Rose Room overview at jazzstandards.com - retrieved on 24 May 2009
  2. ^ Gene Lees: Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White. Oxford University Press US, 1995. ISBN 0-19-510287-8. p. 204