The English Roses One of the teachers there had described the girls as "The English Roses" which Madonna found "funny". She had already progressed with a few other stories but wanted to write about girls who always felt they did not have "enough". The death of Madonna's mother at an early age had always affected her, and her musical endeavors. So while developing Binah, she drew from her own experience of dealing with her mother's death. Like her, Binah kept a picture of her mother beside her bed. It was Madonna's "own personal experience and I needed to come up with things for
Sally Go 'Round the Roses Sally Go 'Round the Roses "Sally Go 'Round the Roses" is the name of a 1963 hit by The Jaynetts, a Bronx-based one-hit wonder girl group, released by J&S Records on the Tuff label. The producer of "Sally Go 'Round the Roses", Abner Spector, was an A&R man for the Chicago-based Chess Records. Spector was responsible for the Corsairs' 1962 number 12 hit "Smoky Places", which had been released on Tuff, a subsidiary of J&S Records. In the summer of 1963, Spector asked J&S owner, Zelma "Zell" Sanders, to assemble a vocal ensemble to record a girl group style record,