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Singer, actor, ‘The Gambler’: Kenny Rogers dies at 81 Kenny Rogers, pop-country singer of ‘The Gambler’ who dominated 1970s music charts, dies at 81
(about 1 hour later)
Actor-singer Kenny Rogers, the smooth, Grammy-winning balladeer who spanned jazz, folk, country and pop with such hits as “Lucille,” “Lady” and “Islands in the Stream” and embraced his persona as “The Gambler” on record and on TV died Friday night. He was 81. Kenny Rogers, a grizzled, raspy-voiced country-pop crooner who specialized in narrative-driven ballads such as “Lucille” and “The Gambler,” the latter of which sent its life-as-a-card-game refrain echoing through popular culture, has died at 81.
He died at home in Sandy Springs, Georgia, representative Keith Hagan told The Associated Press. He was under hospice care and died of natural causes, Hagan said. Rogers was under hospice care and died of natural causes Friday night at home in Sandy Springs, Ga., a representative told the Associated Press. His seven-decade career — which included stardom in “The Gambler” TV films and co-ownership of a fast-food chicken franchise — wound down in 2017 as he encountered health problems that included a diagnosis of bladder cancer.
The Houston-born performer with the husky voice and silver beard sold tens of millions of records, won three Grammys and was the star of TV movies based on “The Gambler” and other songs, making him a superstar in the ‘70s and ’80s. Rogers thrived for some 60 years before retired from touring in 2017 at age 79. Despite his crossover success, he always preferred to be thought of as a country singer. His farewell concerts generated headlines that referred to lyrics from his signature song, about a card player who philosophizes that in life, as in games of chance, “you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”
“You either do what everyone else is doing and you do it better, or you do what no one else is doing and you don’t invite comparison,” Rogers told The Associated Press in 2015. “And I chose that way because I could never be better than Johnny Cash or Willie or Waylon at what they did. So I found something that I could do that didn’t invite comparison to them. And I think people thought it was my desire to change country music. But that was never my issue.” A veteran of doo-wop, jazz and folk groups, Mr. Rogers was pushing 30 when he had his first brush with commercial success as part of the pop group the First Edition. The group’s 1967 hit “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” was about a hallucinogenic trip and was later featured in a psychedelic dream sequence in the 1998 Coen Brothers film “The Big Lebowski.”
A true rags-to-riches story, Rogers was raised in public housing in Houston Heights with seven siblings. As a 20-year-old, he had a gold single called “That Crazy Feeling,” under the name Kenneth Rogers, but when that early success stalled, he joined a jazz group, the Bobby Doyle Trio, as a standup bass player. The act broke up in the mid-1970s, and Mr. Rogers found himself thrice divorced, $65,000 in debt and hawking the “Quick-Pickin’ ‘N Fun-Strummin’ Home Guitar Course” in TV commercials.
But his breakthrough came when he was asked to join the New Christy Minstrels, a folk group, in 1966. The band reformed as First Edition and scored a pop hit with the psychedelic song, “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” Rogers and First Edition mixed country-rock and folk on songs like “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town,” a story of a Vietnam veteran begging his girlfriend to stay. Seeking a change, he found it in Nashville.
After the group broke up in 1974, Rogers started his solo career and found a big hit with the sad country ballad “Lucille,” in 1977, which crossed over to the pop charts and earned Rogers his first Grammy. Suddenly the star, Rogers added hit after hit for more than a decade. “I went to Fan Fair in Nashville at Municipal Auditorium one time,” Mr. Rogers told Billboard, “and there were about 10,000 people in the audience, and they introduced this guy who had had a record back in 1954, and the crowd went crazy. I felt that, with that type of longevity, this is where I needed to be.”
“The Gambler,” the Grammy-winning story song penned by Don Schlitz, came out in 1978 and became his signature song with a signature refrain: “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ’em.” The song spawned a hit TV movie of the same name and several more sequels featuring Rogers as professional gambler Brady Hawkes, and led to a lengthy side career for Rogers as a TV actor and host of several TV specials. Nashville producer Larry Butler engineered Mr. Rogers’s reinvention as a country performer. With his impeccably groomed gray beard and designer western wear, the singer cultivated a romantic but laid-back persona that played off Butler’s careful, hook-laden song choices.
Other hits included “You Decorated My Life,” “Every Time Two Fools Collide” with Dottie West, “Don’t Fall In Love with a Dreamer” with Kim Carnes, and “Coward of the County.” One of his biggest successes was “Lady,” written by Lionel Richie, a chart topper for six weeks straight in 1980. Richie said in a 2017 interview with the AP that he often didn’t finish songs until he had already pitched them, which was the case for “Lady.” “I’d say, ‘I want to do ballads that say what every man would like to say and every woman would want to hear,’ ” Mr. Rogers told The Washington Post in 2016. “And the reason I did that was then you had both audiences: You had the male and female audiences.”
“In the beginning, the song was called, ‘Baby,’” Richie said. “And because when I first sat with him, for the first 30 minutes, all he talked about was he just got married to a real lady. A country guy like him is married to a lady. So, he said, ‘By the way, what’s the name of the song?’” Richie replies: “Lady.” During the 1970s, Mr. Rogers fine-tuned a middle ground between country and easy listening pop that reaped commercial dividends. Every recording he made between 1976 and 1984 sold more than 500,000 copies, and many sold more than 1 million.
Over the years, Rogers worked often with female duet partners, most memorably, Dolly Parton. The two were paired at the suggestion of the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb, who wrote “Islands in the Stream.” “His roots were in pop and folk music,” country music historian Rich Kienzle said in an interview. “He developed a mellow voice that put him in the vanguard of a type of light, fluffy easy listening country which gained the industry name ‘Urban Cowboy’ after the popularity of the John Travolta film. He had a long career because of his crossover appeal to fans of easy listening pop.”
“Barry was producing an album on me and he gave me this song,” Rogers told the AP in 2017. “And I went and learned it and went into the studio and sang it for four days. And I finally looked at him and said, ‘Barry, I don’t even like this song anymore.’ And he said, ‘You know what we need? We need Dolly Parton.’ I thought, ‘Man, that guy is a visionary.’” The love ballads included “You Decorated My Life” and “She Believes in Me,” both from 1979, and a cover the next year of Lionel Richie’s “Lady.” In addition to Don Schlitz’s “The Gambler” (1978), he had hits with “story songs” such as “Lucille” (1977), about a woman leaving her impoverished farmer husband (“You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille”) and “Coward of the County” (1979), the story of a passive man’s bloody revenge against the rapists who attacked his sweetheart. Cumulatively, they established him as a force in country pop.
Coincidentally, Parton was actually in the same recording studio in Los Angeles when the idea came up. Some of his notable duets included “Islands in the Stream” with Dolly Parton and “We’ve Got Tonight” with Sheena Easton, both in 1983; “Don’t Fall in Love With a Dreamer” (1980) with Kim Carnes; and “Every Time Two Fools Collide” (1978) with Dottie West. “Make No Mistake, She’s Mine,” Mr. Rogers’s duet with a male singer Ronnie Milsap, won a Grammy for best country duo in 1987.
“From the moment she marched into that room, that song never sounded the same,” Rogers said. “It took on a whole new spirit.” He won two other competitive Grammys, for “The Gambler” and “Lucille,” and was nominated 19 times. In 2013, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The two singers toured together, including in Australia and New Zealand in 1984 and 1987, and were featured in a HBO concert special. Over the years the two would continue to record together, including their last duet, “You Can’t Make Old Friends,” which was released in 2013. Parton reprised “Islands in the Stream” with Rogers during his all-star retirement concert held in Nashville in October 2017. In part as a backlash against the crossover style of Mr. Rogers and other pop-driven singers, a number of performers such as Randy Travis and George Strait began in the mid-1980s to reorient the music toward its roots. Mr. Rogers’s chart presence declined, but he remained a constant and instantly recognizable presence on television, hosting music specials and bringing the title character of “The Gambler” to life in a series of made-for-TV westerns. He also starred as a racecar driver in the 1982 family film “Six Pack.”
Rogers invested his time and money in a lot of other endeavors over his career, including a passion for photography that led to several books, as well as an autobiography, “Making It With Music.” He had a chain of restaurants called “Kenny Rogers Roasters,” and was a partner behind a riverboat in Branson, Missouri. He was also involved in numerous charitable causes, among them the Red Cross and MusiCares, and was part of the all-star “We are the World” recording for famine relief. In 1991, he invested his earnings and name in a chain of fast-food rotisserie chicken restaurants, Kenny Rogers Roasters. The company achieved a publicity coup in 1996 when its signature bright red neon signs became a plot line in the hit sitcom “Seinfeld.”
By the ‘90s, his ability to chart hits had waned, although he still remained a popular live entertainer with regular touring. Still he was an inventive businessman and never stopped trying to find his way back onto the charts. But the business faced stiff competition from other franchisers, and it filed for bankruptcy in 1998. After several changes in ownership — and the shuttering of its U.S. locations — the company operates principally in Asia.
At the age of 61, Rogers had a brief comeback on the country charts in 2000 with a hit song “Buy Me A Rose,” thanks to his other favorite medium, television. Producers of the series “Touched By An Angel” wanted him to appear in an episode, and one of his managers suggested the episode be based on his latest single. That cross-promotional event earned him his first No. 1 country song in 13 years. Kenneth Ray Rogers was born in Houston on Aug. 21, 1938. He was the fourth of eight children and grew up in a public housing development. He said his father — a carpenter and country fiddler — was an alcoholic who often drank his wages. His mother was a nurse’s assistant.
Rogers is survived by his wife, Wanda, and his sons Justin, Jordan, Chris and Kenny Jr., as well as two brothers, a sister and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, his representative said. The family is planning a private service “out of concern for the national COVID-19 emergency,” a statement posted early Saturday read. A public memorial will be held at a later date. Inspired by a Ray Charles concert he attended at 12, he decided to pursue a music career — in search, he later said, of acclaim and girls. He formed a Houston doo-wop group and called it the Scholars.
___ “A misnomer — there wasn’t a C student in the bunch,” he later quipped. They had a regional hit with “That Crazy Feeling” (1958) released under his own name. One of the group’s follow-up recordings was a song, “Kangewah,” written by Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
Associated Press journalist Mallika Sen contributed from Los Angeles. “We figured she’d plug our record in her column,” Mr. Rogers later told People magazine. “It was a great idea but had no relationship to reality. We came home broke.”
Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. After a stint as a bass player in a local jazz trio, he joined the New Christy Minstrels in 1966. But the next year, feeling stifled by the group’s formulaic hootenanny style, Mr. Rogers and three former Minstrels — singer Mike Settle, guitarist Terry Williams and vocalist Thelma Camacho — formed the First Edition. Mickey Jones, a drummer who had toured with Bob Dylan, rounded out the unit.
With Mr. Rogers increasingly featured as the frontman, the group was later billed as Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. The group’s 1969 hit, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” written by country star Mel Tillis, was about a paralyzed and cuckolded veteran and was perceived as a thinly veiled swipe at the Vietnam War. “Reuben James,” also from 1969, told the story of a black man raising a white child. The band had a syndicated television show — “Rollin’ On The River” (later shortened to “Rollin’”) — which ran from 1971 to 1973.
Mr. Rogers said his ambition and inclination to put work first led to a turbulent personal life. Four of his marriages — to Janice Gordon, Jean Rogers, Margo Anderson and actress Marianne Gordon — ended in divorce. His 1993 divorce settlement with Marianne Gordon, after 16 years of marriage, cost him $60 million.
“She deserves every penny,” he later said, noting that she “stood behind” him in the years he was broke — and before his breakthrough as a major solo performer.
Survivors include his wife of years, Wanda Miller; and several children from his marriages.His oldest brother, Lelan Rogers, an independent record producer who died in 2002, produced some of Mr. Roger’s earliest doo-wop songs.
Mr. Rogers remained an enthusiastic performer, still hoping to make new fans, well into the twilight of his career. “I’ve always said I don’t care whether one person walks away saying, ‘He’s the best singer I’ve ever heard,’ ” he once said. “But I want everyone to walk away saying, ‘I enjoyed that.’ ”
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