Lynn Anderson, Rose Garden singer, dies, aged 67

US country singer Lynn Anderson, best known for her worldwide 1971 hit (I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden, has died, aged 67.

She had been in hospital in Nashville, where she suffered a heart attack on Thursday.

Other US hits included You're My Man, How Can I Unlove You? and Top of the World, also recorded by the Carpenters.

Singer Dolly Parton said, "Lynn is blooming in God's Rose Garden now. We will miss her and remember her fondly."

Born in North Dakota and raised in Sacramento, California, Anderson was the daughter of two country songwriters and started performing at the age of six.

In 1967, she began a two-year television engagement on The Lawrence Welk Show, which led to a contract with Columbia Records in Nashville, the capital of country music.

"He was absolutely wholesome,'' she later said of Welk in an Associated Press interview.

"He felt country music was coming into its own and deserved to be on national TV."

She won a Grammy award for Rose Garden and was the Country Music Association's female vocalist of the year in 1971.

"It was popular because it touched on emotions,'' she told AP.

"It was perfectly timed. It was out just as we came out of the Vietnam years and a lot of people were trying to recover. This song stated that you can make something out of nothing. You take it and go ahead."

Alongside her singing career, she made a number of television appearances with stars including Lucille Ball, Bing Crosby and John Wayne.

She also appeared in episodes of the cop show Starsky and Hutch and in the 1990 BBC drama The Wreck on the Highway.