A love letter to a neighborhood, a specific place written with such tenderness that it becomes universal. Ben E. King recorded it as a Latin-tinged ballad, he describing a rose growing up through the concrete of Spanish Harlem. The rose is a woman, but the song is also about the resilience of beauty in unlikely places. The Spanish Harlem of the title is not just a geographical location. It is a state of mind, a place where the most beautiful things grow out of the hardest ground. The flamenco guitar that opens the track sets the scene perfectly.

That same love letter gets a soul-gospel reading from