The 1960s File Feature
Second Hand Rose
Barbra Streisand: "Second Hand Rose" (1965) "Second Hand Rose" is one of the most beloved comedy-character songs in Barbra Streisand's extraordinary catalog,…
01 The Story
Barbra Streisand: "Second Hand Rose" (1965)
"Second Hand Rose" is one of the most beloved comedy-character songs in Barbra Streisand's extraordinary catalog, a number that she transformed from a minor standard into a career touchstone through sheer force of personality and vocal brilliance. The song, originally written by Grant Clarke (lyrics) and James F. Hanley (music) in 1921, had been a minor piece of musical theatre repertoire for decades before Streisand made it her own. Her recording was released on Columbia Records in late 1965 and entered the Billboard Hot 100 on December 18, 1965, debuting at number 82. It climbed through the holiday season and into the new year, reaching its peak of number 32 on the week of February 5, 1966, spending 9 weeks on the chart.
Streisand had by 1965 established herself as one of the most remarkable talents in American popular music, a singer whose combination of technical virtuosity, interpretive intelligence, and theatrical instinct had made her a star of Broadway, television, and recording in an astonishingly short time. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 24, 1942, she had made her Broadway debut in I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962 and had immediately attracted attention as a performer of extraordinary gifts. Her recording contract with Columbia Records, signed the same year, launched a recording career that would prove to be one of the most sustained and commercially successful in popular music history.
The recording of "Second Hand Rose" was produced by Robert Mersey, who worked with Streisand on much of her early Columbia output. The production placed the song in an arrangement that balanced period authenticity, suggesting the early twentieth-century vaudeville context from which the song originally came, with a contemporary pop sensibility that made it accessible to 1965 radio audiences. This balance between nostalgia and modernity was a specialty of Streisand's early work, a quality that allowed her to draw on the Great American Songbook and theatrical repertoire while connecting with an audience that was primarily consuming contemporary pop.
The song appeared on the album My Name Is Barbra, Two, the follow-up to My Name Is Barbra, which had been one of the most celebrated debut television specials in the history of the medium when it aired on CBS in 1965. The television special had further elevated Streisand's already formidable public profile and created enormous appetite for her recordings. The chart success of "Second Hand Rose" was thus partly a beneficiary of that television exposure, which had given her a visibility that very few recording artists of the era could match.
On the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, which in the mid-1960s was called the Easy Listening chart, "Second Hand Rose" performed extremely well, consistent with Streisand's particular appeal to an adult audience that valued vocal artistry and production sophistication over the louder, more insistent qualities of rock and roll. Her chart crossover success, reaching number 32 on the Hot 100 while doing even better on the Adult Contemporary listing, demonstrated the breadth of her appeal and the capacity of her recordings to reach multiple listener demographics simultaneously.
The song's humor, which concerns a narrator who complains that everything in her life is secondhand, is deployed with a comic timing that reveals Streisand's gifts as a comedic performer alongside her more celebrated dramatic vocal qualities. She had demonstrated this comic facility on Broadway and television, and the recording captured it in a medium that could preserve it indefinitely. The combination of vocal brilliance and comic intelligence in a single performance is rare, and Streisand's ability to deliver both simultaneously is part of what makes this particular recording so distinctive within her catalog.
The nine-week Hot 100 run and peak at number 32 represented solid mainstream pop chart performance for an artist whose primary commercial identity was oriented toward adult audiences rather than the teen demographic that drove the highest chart positions in the mid-1960s. Columbia Records' promotional investment in the single reflected their understanding of Streisand as one of their most valuable artists, and the chart results justified that investment while confirming her ability to compete for mainstream pop attention despite working in a style that was more sophisticated and less rock-oriented than much of what dominated radio in 1965 and 1966.
02 Song Meaning
Comic Identity and the Art of Self-Presentation in "Second Hand Rose"
"Second Hand Rose" achieves its comic effect through the gap between what the narrator claims to be lamenting and what the audience perceives her actually to be celebrating. The character, a working-class woman whose entire material existence is composed of other people's discards, complaints about her situation with such verve and such detailed comic observation that the complaint itself becomes a form of self-assertion. She is defining herself through the catalog of her secondhandness, and in doing so, paradoxically, she becomes vivid and original.
Written in 1921 for a vaudeville context, the song's comic tradition belongs to a distinctly American theatrical style that took working-class experience seriously as a subject for entertainment and found in ordinary people's struggles a kind of dignity and humor that more genteel entertainment avoided. The character of Rose, with her secondhand clothes and secondhand beau and secondhand nose, is a figure from the immigrant working-class experience of early twentieth-century New York, someone who has not had access to anything new but who has survived and indeed thrived through resourcefulness and a resilient sense of humor about her circumstances.
Barbra Streisand's identification with this character was not accidental. Growing up in Brooklyn in working-class circumstances, Streisand had a personal connection to the emotional and social world the song described, even if the specifics of her experience were different from Rose's. Her ability to inhabit the character completely, to find both the comedy and the underlying dignity in the situation, reflects an interpretive intelligence that goes far deeper than technical vocal skill. She is not performing Rose from the outside but finding the character from within.
The comic mode of the song, the extended catalog of secondhand items deployed with increasing absurdity, is a form of comic rhetoric that has deep roots in both vaudeville and Jewish comedic tradition. The joke works through accumulation: each additional secondhand item is funnier because it builds on what has come before, and the sheer comprehensiveness of Rose's secondhand existence becomes the source of escalating humor. Streisand's timing in delivering these accumulated absurdities is impeccable, a skill developed through years of theatrical performance that cannot be fully notated in a score or taught in a classroom.
The song also participates in a tradition of comedy that finds liberation in constraint. Rose cannot afford new things, but she has developed an entire philosophy and aesthetic around secondhandness that transforms her limitation into something approaching a worldview. There is a kind of wisdom in her acceptance of her situation, and in her ability to find humor in it, that the song presents without sentimentality or condescension. She is not to be pitied; she is to be admired and laughed with, not at.
The mid-1960s context in which Streisand recorded the song gave it an additional layer of meaning. At a moment when popular culture was saturated with novelty, when newness itself had become a dominant cultural value, a song celebrating the oldest things in the drawer was a gentle, comic corrective. Rose's insistence on the legitimacy of secondhand experience was a reminder that value does not always reside in the newest or the most expensive, a democratic proposition that had particular resonance at a moment of tremendous commercial expansion in American consumer culture. Streisand found all of these layers in the material and delivered them with the effortless mastery that characterized everything she did during this period of her career.
→ More from the 1960s File
View all 1960s hits →
Keep digging