By and large, growth follows the knife so, counter-intuitively, you need to cut more to encourage more vigorous growth...but because this is a balancing act seeing how the rose needs top photo-synthesising growth too, it is usual to cut back by a third and sometimes up to half of top growth. What and where you cut depends, to some extent, on the type of rose. A multiflora rambler, for example, benefits from taking out a third of canes, right back to the base, after flowering in June/July.....whereas a climbing hybrid Tea such as Etoile de Hollande tends to throw a gangly framework and long laterals - there is a continuous changeover of old laterals being cut out and newer ones tied in place, cutting out die-back and waiting till spring.
Sammy, I would get armoured up and dive into the centre of the rose (grovel about underneath, most likely), taking out the oldest third (or anything really gnarly), canes, back to a few inches above the crown - you might only need to remove 1 or 2 which have had laterals on top of laterals getting twiggier by the season. Lots of water and a nice slow-release fertiliser and Bob's your Uncle - job done.

My advice would be, as campanula says, to take out one or two of the oldest branches to the ground and only moderately prune the rest--kind of a light haircut.

One other thing--trim a little from the tips to determine if the center of the cane is white (not tan or brown). If there is brown, go down several inches and trim again. If there is still brown, keep repeating the process--until you get to WHITE centers. If you leave those brown centered canes to bloom, they may put out one spring bloom cycle and then suddenly collapse and die. No more "energy" left. Whereas if you go back to white centers (even if it means going practically to the soil line), the cane has the ability to function and rebloom normally.

In our areas where we get lots of late winter/early spring freeze-thaw-freeze cycles, brown centers are often a much bigger problem than a lot of people realize.

Kate

Thank you, Campanula and Kate. As it turns out, there are no choices. I cannot try to grow something that is dead. The good part is that I have not lost too many. The bad part is I have had to cut deeply this year.

Today is my last day of spring break, and I am simply cutting. I am leaving the piles of canes on the ground to dispose of later, and am trying to go down as far as I can.

When the winter is cold for weeks on end, and the pipes are capable of freezing, there is no real way for someone like me to water the roses as I should have done.

I am surprised that more people have not had a similar problem. Possibly the drought was more isolated than I had thought.

Sammy

Some teas really don't like being pruned. What I do is take out whole branches from the base rather than cut them shorter. When I was doing the latter, the teas would put out a lot of growth in all different directions from the cut, and that was not attractive.

This year I had to cut down a lot of my teas since I am moving them, and also some of them had a lot of dead wood from the cold. Normallly I don't prune roses every year, like HTs, but maybe every 2-3 years take out a lot of canes to rejuvenate them.

Sammy we had long COLD periods but lots of wet here in Middle Tennessee. I'm dealing with a lot of canker and dead canes. Some dead roses too. However, lots of canes are greening up. I thought I'd lost 1 Mutabalis but it is putting out new leaves. 1 Safrano was hit pretty hard while the other (in what I consider a more exposed position) didn't miss a beat.
I hope the pruning rejuvenates them for you! Thanks to all for the advice. I "clipped" it.
Susan

My Spring Break is over, and for at least a week, our good weather is over. Once again I realize that there are not too many choices. I cut most of the roses almost to the ground. Fortunately, they are own root, and hopefully will spring back.

As long as it is not raining, I hope to get out there and cut some more. I still have some large roses to cut back.

I had more black and dead brown canes than I can ever remember. I am also preparing another order of new roses.