Legendary country singer, Houston native had eye for hit ballads
Kenny Rogers’ six-decade career coursed through country music and jazz, rock ’n’ roll and folk, but through all these styles he cut a singular path as one of popular music’s great balladeers.
“Ballads,” Rogers told the Chronicle in 2012, “say what every man would like to say and every woman wants to hear.”
Rogers started in music playing jazz in Houston and moved through folk and rock in California before he became one of country music’s greatest crossover stars. Country music as it was in the 1970s didn’t fit Rogers, so he changed the sound of the music to where it did. He sidestepped the honky tonk trimmings — the pedal steel guitars and rhinestone-studded suits — and also stood outside the rougeish offshoot of songwriter-driven outlaw country in the ’70s. He instead embraced big songs with memorable stories, and big pop hooks became a musical style of his own based on hit ballads such as “Lady” and “She Believes in Me” as well as iconic story songs such as “The Gambler” and “Lucille.”
Rogers, among the most internationally successful and popular singers to come from Houston, died Friday night at his home in Georgia of natural causes, his
family announced. He was 81.
He leaves behind a remarkable career full of success on both the country and pop charts, which resulted in three Grammy Awards and induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. His work extended beyond music into roles in TV and film, various businesses including a roasted chicken chain that bore his name and a visage so iconic — with his snow-white hair and salt-and-pepper beard — that it spawned a website full of lookalikes.
But even though Rogers’ star shone beyond music, his music was a comforting home for millions of listeners around the world. His vocal range was limited, but with his reedy, instantly recognizable voice, his mode of expression was awash in sincerity, which he used to great effect across decades.
“He was a good guy and a great singer,” singer and producer Steve Tyrell, who grew up playing the same Houston clubs as Rogers, said Saturday. “You knew he’d go on to be a superstar, to make records with Barbra Streisand and the Bee Gees and Dolly Parton. He could sing anything.”
Rogers landed plenty of hits by great songwriters from Nashville. But he also did wonders with work by pop writers such as the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb and Lionel Richie.
“He was practically a member of the Commodores,” Richie told the Chronicle in 2013. Rogers reached out to Richie in the 1970s because he wanted a song like “Three Times a Lady,” which Richie wrote for his band.
“I just wrote, ‘Baby, I’m your knight in shining armor and I love you … bah bah bah bah,’ ” Richie said. “And Kenny asked, ‘Where’s the rest of the song?’ I told him if he liked it, I’d finish it. He said, ‘Let me tell you a story. I married this girl named Mary Ann, and I had no business being with her because she was a lady. A full-on lady. I don’t know what she was doing with a country guy like me. … What was the name of the song again?’
“I said, ‘Um … ‘Lady.’ ” Decades later, Rogers’ reading of Richie’s song remains a marvel of restraint. He didn’t sing the refrain as much as he inhaled and then exhaled it.
Such was Rogers’ way with songs. He had a falcon’s eye for a hit ballad.
Local roots
Rogers, one of eight children, was born Aug. 21, 1938, and grew up in the San Felipe Courts housing project. “It was that thing, growing up, that idea that we didn’t know we were poor,” he said.
“I think my mom knew I’d never work for a living,” he told the Chronicle. “I think she was just hopeful that I’d find something. Anything. … She thought all I did was sing.”
His musical career started in unassuming fashion: playing bass in a jazz band in Houston. As a kid, Rogers attended Wharton Elementary School in Montrose and Jefferson Davis High School (now Northside High School). While still in high school, he found his way to the city’s clubs and bars. He worked in 1960 with the Bobby Doyle Three, sporting a pompadour and a bow tie and playing vocal jazz at Jimmy Menutis, a hopping club on Telephone Road converted from a movie theater by its namesake Greek businessman.
He was also a patron at the club, getting to see Jimmy Reed and “my biggest hero, Ray Charles.” Tyrell remembers seeing the trio arrive at gigs in three Cadillac convertibles. And he recalls them filling up after-hours shows at the Houstonaire club on the Southwest Freeway.
ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons recalls seeing Rogers at what he referred to as “one of those ‘pressure cooker clubs’ ” called the Rusty Bucket on Old Galveston Highway. “You could see the likes of Joey Long, Barbara Lynn and Roy Head,” Gibbons said Saturday. “Kenny could hold his own with the best of them.”
Rogers said in the early days he he made $800 a week playing solo shows and gigs with Doyle’s band. His path was cut.
Leaving Houston
Rogers made connections through his older brother Lelan, who worked in the music industry. The elder Rogers would go on to start International Artists, a short-lived but influential label that put out several landmark psychedelic rock albums in the 1960s.
After leaving Doyle’s employ,
Rogers headed west to California and spent a very short time with the folk ensemble the New Christy Minstrels before joining the First Edition, which formed in 1967. The band set a path for Rogers: It threaded various styles of music into its sound, including rock, pop, country and folk, all with a little psychedelic glimmer.
With Rogers as singer, the First Edition hit No. 5 on the pop charts in 1968 with “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” another Houston connection. The song was written by native Mickey Newbury.
“Rogers was a fellow Houstonian, so I was keenly aware of his rise from the start,” Gibbons said before expressing his admiration for the song. “It was a brilliant amalgamation of psychedelic themes and a polished pop production that caught my ear in no uncertain terms. Kenny’s vocal was spot-on insofar as he served as the narrator of his own inner journey. Let’s be real, he was singing about an acid trip and was quite convincing.”
Rogers’ renown grew, so the First Edition became Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. The group recorded five more pop hits including one that would become a Rogers staple for the rest of his life: “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”
When Lyle Lovett was a child, once a week his mother would drive from her job downtown up to where they lived in Klein and take him back downtown for guitar lessons.
“I remember going to guitar lessons and hearing that song on the radio with her,” Lovett said Saturday. “And my mom told me Kenny Rogers was from Houston. That just made me feel like I was part of something. It made me feel like, ‘Oh, maybe there’s hope for me.’ Even then there was this sense he was a big deal. The guys on the radio always mentioned that he was from Houston.”
By the mid-1970s, Rogers left the band and suffered no ill effects from doing so. He pivoted away from rock and folk and more toward country music, but without a lot of the musical queues country music fans had come to expect. He slowed down the tempo and let his reedy voice course through ballads and slower story songs. Just about everything he recorded turned into a charting country hit, and Rogers also hit the pop charts another 21 times.
During this era, Rogers built a songbook that would sustain him until his retirement. “Lucille” was a No. 5 pop hit in 1977; “She Believes in Me” hit No. 5 in 1979. After Richie completed “Lady,” it hit No. 1 pop in 1980. Rogers and Dolly Parton took Barry Gibb’s “Islands in the Stream” to No. 1 three years later.
While these are core pieces of the Rogers lore and songbook, perhaps his most enduring cultural moment came in 1977 when he released “The Gambler.” The song was a No. 1 country single and rose to No. 16 on the pop charts. But the song became something iconic unbound by chart positions.
“The Gambler” was written by Don Schlitz, now a deservedly lauded songwriter with a long and distinguished career. At the time, Schlitz was looking for a hit. “The Gambler” had been recorded several times before by other artists but never got a foothold.
“The song was just waiting to find the right singer and it did,” Schlitz told the Chronicle. “This Houston native, Kenny Rogers. Of course, all the elements made that a perfect storm song.”
Schlitz pointed out that the song benefited from coming out after “Lucille,” which was a big hit. But he also commented on the iconography Rogers brought to it: The character he stepped into on the album’s cover, which would inspire a series of TV movies with the same title. “The persona absolutely fit him,” Schlitz said.
The song’s refrain — “you gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em” — became so culturally embedded that it’s easy to lose sight of how deeply it permeated popular culture. Certainly the song has been covered many times over the years, but it’s also been sampled and repurposed in hip-hop. It became the name of a Houston-based United States Football League team. It grew because of Rogers, but it also grew bigger than Rogers.
He’d appear in five “Gambler” films between 1980 and 1994, but he also continued populating the pop and country charts with other hit songs. He downplayed the iconography of the song when talking to the Chronicle in 2012: “It’s not about a gambler,” he said. “It’s about a structure. A way to live your life.”
The last deal
Rogers in 2015 announced his Gambler’s Last Deal tour.
When he spoke to the Chronicle a few years before that announcement, Rogers exuded his usual upbeat demeanor but for a moment when he looked back on his father’s life. He called his father “a proud man” who “couldn’t find a job to support his family,” which led to or fed his alcoholism. Rogers expressed determination not to follow that path. In 2004, he and his wife had twin sons, and as they grew up Rogers decided to spend more time with his family.
Fans fervently greeted him at every stop, and Rogers stayed at the table until 2018 when his health forced him to cut a few dates from its end.
In interviews, he remained grateful and at times bemused about his 60-year career. He laughed at a memory of watching a news report about Somali pirates. As the camera panned across a group of teenage pirates, their faces obscured by bandannas, he noticed one wearing a Kenny Rogers tour shirt.
“That’s gotta take some hostility out of the group, right?” he asked.
Any career that spans six decades will have its period of ebb and flow. And any artist who sticks it out as long as Rogers did with as much success as he had will find their way to punchlines. An episode of TV’s “Seinfeld” riffed on Rogers’ chicken chain, Kenny Rogers Roasters, which opened in 1991 and filed for bankruptcy seven years later. In 2000, graphic designer Jaimie Muehlhausen started the website MenWhoLookLikeKennyRogers.com, compiling photos of middle- and late-middle-aged men who resembled Rogers.
Such cultural connections speak to Rogers’ ubiquity. He simply had so much success as a musician, that even those who didn’t listen to his music knew his name.
But such cultural connections would never have been made without the music, and Rogers leaves behind a lot of it, which defied easy categorization years before genre distinctions began to dissipate.
“I think I’m a country singer,” he said, “with a lot of other influences. When I left Houston, I was a jazz singer. I arrived in California and became a folk singer. That’s going from difficult, intricate, specific music to a very general music with a message. I saw the beauty of both. Then the First Edition, which was folk rock. Then country music. I’ve always been able to enjoy the quality of good music, no matter what genre. That’s a great asset. A lot of guys in the business can’t sing the types of songs they want to sing.”