Kenny Rogers: The First 50 Years
Islands In The Stream (featuring Dolly Parton) * Lucille * The Gambler * She Believes In Me * Lady * We’ve Got Tonight (featuring Sheena Easton). 45 songs in all, includes 3 NEW recordings!

Kenny Rogers: The First 50 Years

• • Track
  • Title
  • Artist/Composer
  • Time
  
  
• • 1
  • Islands In The Stream
  • Kenny Rogers Duet With Dolly Parton
  
  
• • 2
  • Make No Mistake, She’s Mine
  • Ronnie Milsap & Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 3
  • We’ve Got Tonight
  • Kenny Rogers And Sheena Easton
  
  
• • 4
  • What About Me?
  • Kenny Rogers With Kim Carnes And James Ingram
  
  
• • 5
  • Owe Them More Than That
  • Kenny Rogers Featuring Tim McGraw
  
  
• • 6
  • ’Til I Can Make It On My Own
  • Kenny Rogers And Dottie West
  
  
• • 7
  • Calling Me
  • Kenny Rogers Featuring Don Henley
  
  
• • 8
  • Real Love
  • Dolly Parton With Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 9
  • Every Time Two Fools Collide
  • Kenny Rogers And Dottie West
  
  
• • 10
  • If I Ever Fall In Love Again
  • Anne Murray With Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 11
  • All I Ever Need Is You
  • Kenny Rogers And Dottie West
  
  
• • 12
  • If I Knew Then What I Know Now
  • Kenny Rogers Duet With Gladys Knight
  
  
• • 13
  • Don’t Fall In Love With A Dreamer
  • Kenny Rogers Vocal Duet With Kim Carnes
  
  
• • 14
  • If I Were You
  • Kenny Rogers Duet With Travis Tritt
  
  
• • 15
  • Tell Me That You Love Me (PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED)
  • Kenny Rogers And Dolly Parton
  
  

Kenny Rogers: The First 50 Years

• • Track
  • Title
  • Artist/Composer
  • Time
  
  
• • 1
  • Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town
  • Kenny Rogers And The First Edition
  
  
• • 2
  • Lucille
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 3
  • Ruben James
  • Kenny Rogers And The First Edition
  
  
• • 4
  • Sweet Music Man
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 5
  • The Gambler
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 6
  • Abraham, Martin And John / Precious Memories (Medley)
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 7
  • Coward Of The County
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 8
  • San Francisco Mabel Joy
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 9
  • Scarlet Fever
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 10
  • Twenty Years Ago
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 11
  • The Factory
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 12
  • Ol’ Red
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 13
  • The Greatest
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 14
  • Harder Cards
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 15
  • Goodbye (PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED)
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  

Kenny Rogers: The First 50 Years

• • Track
  • Title
  • Artist/Composer
  • Time
  
  
• • 1
  • She Believes In Me
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 2
  • I Don’t Need You
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 3
  • Love Will Turn You Around
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 4
  • You Decorated My Life
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 5
  • Lady
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 6
  • Love The World Away
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 7
  • Crazy
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 8
  • I Prefer The Moonlight
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 9
  • A Love Song
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 10
  • Beautiful (All That You Could Be)
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 11
  • The Vows Go Unbroken (Always True To You)
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 12
  • Morning Desire
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 13
  • Through The Years
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  
• • 14
  • Buy Me A Rose
  • Kenny Rogers With Alison Krauss & Billy Dean
  
  
• • 15
  • Natural Thing To Do (PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED)
  • Kenny Rogers
  
  

Always comfortable in front of the cameras, Kenny Rogers leaned back and talked. “My life has been a series of peaks,” he said. “I think the key to success is slow, steady progress. I’ve been around a long time. I thought I knew all about ups and downs, but this is the sweetest up I’ve ever known.” It could have been yesterday, but this was Kenny talking to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show about Lucille. Counting out Kenny Rogers has been a bad idea for as long as most of us can remember. The gambler always seems to come up with a winning hand when he needs one.

“I find being successful easier to live with, of course,” Kenny said a few years later, “but every time I was down I was confident that I’d be back up again. Part of the fun for me of getting to the top of the mountain is the climb. If you don’t enjoy the climb, you can’t appreciate the peak.” When Kenny appeared at Far Fair in 1997, his record company calculated that he had sold 80 million records to date, meaning that someone had bought a Kenny Rogers record every 15 seconds for the previous 40 years. Even in 1997 some might have written off Kenny Rogers, but three years later he was back on top of the country charts with Buy Me a Rose.

When Kenny quit college to work his first local hit, That Crazy Feeling, in 1958, you could still buy 78-rpm records. Stereo LPs were introduced the month his single came out. Since then, Kenny has seen 45s go the way of 78s, and he has seen cassettes and 8-tracks come and go. He has seen LPs supplanted by CDs and CDs begin to give way to downloads. Several of the companies that once issued Kenny Rogers records have disappeared. Recording studios once looked like broom closets with a couple of microphones; now they look like spacecraft. But for all the changes, it still comes down to finding the right song at the right time. There’s a little luck involved, but no one stays that lucky that long. The key is to ignore the herd and go your own way. “Lots of artists,” says Kenny, “they say, ‘What’s out there that the people like that I can improve upon?’ I say, ‘What’s not out there?’ Whenever I’ve had a major hit, it has come when there was nothing else like it out there at the time.”

Kenny Rogers’s voice is an everyday voice. Songs sound like conversations between friends. He sings to you, not at you. It’s the art that conceals art. Maybe his ease with a song comes from his having mastered nearly every branch of popular music: rock ’n’ roll, pop, jazz, folk, blues, and country. Very few artists bring that much knowledge to every song and every session.

Kenneth Ray Rogers is from a family of eight kids who grew up on the poor side of Houston. His father was a carpenter and a shipyard worker. “I think my love for music started when my father played his fiddle,” Kenny said once. “All my cousins, brothers, and sisters would sing and play. Even though I was just a kid, I saw how happy everyone was.” He hasn’t just made the dream come true, he embodies it. He often says, “I represent the ability, the possibility, in this country of succeeding from nothing.” And he did it with music.

When Kenny talked to Playboy magazine in 1983, he was unusually candid about his drive. “Maybe my hunger for success came from having three sisters and four brothers. It was always, ‘You kids get outside.’ It was never ‘Kenny (or Kenneth, as I was called until I was eighteen), come here.’ My mother worked nights and my father took extra jobs to get me the money to go to the University of Houston. I was the first person in my family to finish high school, much less go to college, so when I quit college to become a musician, my parents couldn’t understand my motivation. To them, musicians were alcoholics who worked in bars playing guitar for quarters and dimes. I was the family’s ray of hope. Maybe I put a lot of pressure on myself. Success became inordinately important.” Sometime in 1956 an R&B package show starring the Drifters, Hank Ballard, and Sam Cooke came to Houston, and Kenny Rogers was in the audience. “I remember looking up there and thinking, ‘Those guys are making a living just singing songs. What a great life that has got to be.’” He formed a group at school called the Scholars, and they made a few records. Their big night came in 1957 when they got a gig at an Air Force base in San Antonio and came home with thirteen dollars each after gas. Soon after that, Kenny Rogers went solo.

To a nineteen-year-old with a record in the regional charts, success must have seemed pretty easy. “The problem was,” Kenny reflected later, “I didn’t have a clue what to do as a follow-up. I was a standing ovation without an encore.” He joined the Bobby Doyle Three, playing bass in a supper club jazz group. They were big in the Houston nightspots, and recorded an album for Columbia Records around 1962. A few years later, Kenny was ready to move on again. In 1966 he joined the New Christy Minstrels. No group ever had so many talented performers rotate through it. Gene Clark left to join the Byrds, Kim Carnes left to go solo, Barry McGuire left to sing Eve of Destruction, Larry Ramos left to join the Association, and Kenny Rogers left with three others to form the First Edition. Out in California, they came to the attention of Jimmy Bowen, a former Texas rockabilly singer who had become a producer for Frank Sinatra’s Reprise Records. Bowen signed the First Edition to his production company, leased the recordings to Reprise, and decided that the First Edition should become Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.

Between 1968 and 1972, Kenny and the First Edition charted 10 records. The biggest was Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. Country songwriter Mel Tillis had written it about a wounded World War II vet he’d known back home in Florida whose British war bride ran around on him. It had been recorded a couple of times before Kenny and the First Edition turned to it, but by 1969 the country was souring on the Vietnam War, and Ruby was a song whose time had come. NBC news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley made it into a powerful piece of news theater when they played it over scenes of the war at the close of their program. The quiet desperation in Kenny’s vocal was set to an insistent bomp-da-bomp heartbeat rhythm. You knew there couldn’t be a good outcome. In an era of over-production and over-playing, Ruby showed how little you needed to be effective. Released just weeks before Woodstock, it became a worldwide smash.

Kenny tried recording the First Edition for his own label (“a lesson in futility”), and the group broke up around 1975. “I was counting on Kenny Rogers and the First Edition to take me through my whole life,” he reflected a few years later. “It made me aware of how temporary success is. It can just go. You’re never safe. I remember we’d had our sixth hit and I thought we’d stumbled onto a magic success formula. Five years later, the group had disbanded and I was $65,000 in debt. This business is like mountain climbing. You don’t just stay on the top.”

In 1975, Kenny Rogers was 37 years old in a business that worshipped youth, and for the first time since the late ’50s, he was on his own. “It was real hard to get him any bookings,” said his manager at the time, Ken Kragen. “I finally got him a spot as an opening act on a Captain & Tennille tour. That was the absolute low point for him. He called me one day and said, ‘I don’t know if I can continue.’” He’d sung rock ’n’ roll, pop standards, jazz, folk, and contemporary rock, and now the way forward was back. Country music: the music his father and cousins had played in Houston. He knew you had to be in Nashville to play the game, so he flew in to check out real estate. His house purchase fell through and he never relocated, but he met Larry Butler, who signed him to UA Records. UA sounded like it was a big-deal subsidiary of the film company, but in fact two guys, Jerry Rubinstein and Artie Mogull, had bought the label from United Artists’ parent company with a loan from Capitol Records, and midway through Kenny’s years on UA, Capitol foreclosed on the loan and took over the label. UA signed Kenny to a two-album deal for a very modest $30,000 advance that went toward hiring a band.

One year into his UA contract, Kenny Rogers hadn’t scored a pop hit anyone could remember for seven years, but his first UA album had delivered a couple of singles to the country charts. What he needed was a home run to let country fans and country radio know he wasn’t just another pop singer dabbling in country music. Songwriter Hal Bynum was a Texan who’d been around the music business as long as Kenny Rogers. While he was trying to keep his faltering marriage alive, one of his wife’s friends began urging him to start an affair with her. When his wife went out of town, Bynum knew he was going to either call his wife’s friend or go on a binge. “You picked a fine time to leave me,” he told his wife. Bynum’s pal, Roger Bowling, helped him shape a song out of all that was going wrong in his life. Producer Larry Butler added Lucille to a pile of 30 songs for Kenny’s second UA album, and with studio time ticking away, he thought it would be an easy number for everyone to learn. “I ran it down with the band,” he said. “We rehearsed it one time, we turned the machines on, and we cut it in 15 minutes.” In April 1977, Lucille hit No. 1 on the country charts, and Kenny Rogers was back. He’d even prophesized it. In 1976 he had written a book, Making It with Music, and when he went out to publicize the book he said that within a year he would have a No. 1 country hit that would cross over to the pop charts. “If I don’t,” he said, “tell the readers to disregard everything I say.”

Kenny Rogers’s personal journey had taken him back to country music, and a country song, Lucille, took him back to the pop top 10 for the first time since Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. “That was my favorite time, was when Lucille came out,” Kenny said later. “My manager, Ken Kragen, and I had plenty of strategy time. We’d meet for hours in the day, and we’d say, ‘If we can pull this off, and then do this, maybe they’ll let me sing a song on the American Music Awards, and then maybe they’ll let you on The Tonight Show. If you get on The Tonight Show maybe they’ll let you host it once or twice.’ It was a little ladder we planned, and we pulled it off.”

Toward the end of 1977, Kenny was in Nashville and turned up early for a session with Larry Butler. Another of Butler’s artists, Dottie West, was finishing up her session. “Kenny had a session later that night,” she said. “Every Time Two Fools Collide was a song for me. He sat down and was listening as I worked. I came in to listen to a playback, and there was just Larry Butler, Kenny and me. He paid me a nice compliment, and I said, ‘I’d like to record and sing with Kenny Rogers.’ Kenny shook my hand and said, ‘You got it.’ Larry Butler said the time to do it was right then. That’s what it means when they say a song has its time to happen. There were almost sparks flying.” Every Time Two Fools Collide became a duet, and it topped the country charts. Kenny soon realized what duets could do for his career. “They serve a couple of purposes,” he said. “First of all, there’s the chemistry that happens when you’re in the studio. You go in as an individual and you sing the best you’re capable of, but then someone else makes you realize that there’s a little more you can reach for. And it’s important for a career because it’s a way to have a release out without beating a sound into the ground.” Since then, rarely more than a few years have passed between Kenny Rogers’s duets.

Duets were important to Kenny’s career, and so were story songs. Singing a story song is almost an acting job. “I can make you understand the story,” Kenny said later, “and really believe it for the three minutes it takes to sing it.” Ruby, Ruben James, and Lucille set the stage for The Gambler. Songwriter Don Schlitz didn’t even own a car when he wrote about the guy who knows “when to hold ’em” and “when to fold ’em.” Another songwriter had just shown him the open D tuning on the guitar, and Schlitz was fascinated by its droning sound. Walking two miles back to his apartment with the open D tuning churning through his mind, he began composing. Several artists, Schlitz included, recorded The Gambler without much success before it reached Kenny’s ears. Kenny altered a few words, added a key change, and took the song to No. 1 on the country charts and No. 16 on the pop charts. In 1980 it inspired a top-rated made-for-TV movie starring Kenny as Brady Hawkes the Gambler.

Just a few years into his solo career, Kenny Rogers had already mastered the story song and recorded several hit duets. His reputation for love songs was cemented once and for ever with Lady in 1980. Knowing that he couldn’t stand still and take his fans for granted, he stopped working with Larry Butler. “We’d had hit after hit after hit,” he said. “I began to feel successful but stagnant. Larry and I kept trying to find a different way to go, but we just couldn’t. It was risky for me to go outside Nashville having had that kind of success, but I listened to the Commodores and when I heard Three Times a Lady I thought, ‘Boy, there’s a guy.’” Kenny played tennis with Motown Records president Berry Gordy, who had the Commodores under contract. Kenny asked Gordy to relay a message to the group’s leader and principal songwriter, Lionel Richie. Would he be interested in working together? Kenny didn’t know it, but it was a good moment to call. The Commodores’ drummer had been injured, and they’d canceled a tour. Lionel Richie flew to Las Vegas to meet Kenny and walked into his dressing room at the Riviera singing, “Lady, da-da-da-da-da.” Kenny said, “Is that all you’ve got?” They began talking, and Kenny told Lionel about his relationship with his wife, and Lionel adapted some of what Kenny told him for the song.

“Kenny was so genuine,” Lionel said later. “I produced him standing side by side with him in the booth. To do two songs he spent eight and a half hours in that booth without taking a break.” Kenny explained why they needed that long. “Lionel wouldn’t accept the way I wanted to sing Lady. So I had to learn it his way, line by line. The final product was 80 percent Lionel, and one of my best vocals ever. If there was one song I could sing forever, it has to be Lady, because I think that song says what every man wants to say to a woman and what every woman wants to hear from a man.” The painstaking work was repaid many times over when Lady became a No. 1 country hit and Kenny’s first ever No. 1 pop hit.

“Everyone thought I was crazy when I went to work with Lionel,” Kenny told Joe Smith a few years later. “They said, ‘He’s R&B,’ and that’s exactly what I wanted. One of my favorite albums ever is Ray Charles’s [Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music]. What he did was take country songs and sang them R&B. I took R&B tracks and sang them country. Country music is the white man’s R&B. The beauty of both country and R&B is that if it hurts, they’ll say it hurts.”

No one was selling more records than Kenny Rogers. He got a lot of press when he bought the De Laurentiis house in Beverly Hills at a reported cost of $14.5 million. “By the way,” he told a journalist who still called it the De Laurentiis house, “it’s called the Knoll. I figure since I paid that much, I don’t have to call it the De Laurentiis house anymore.” He had two other houses in the Los Angeles area and a 1,200-acre spread in Georgia. Kenny’s friend Bill Medley (of the Righteous Brothers) remarked that Kenny needed to make $1.5 million a month just to break even. But times were good, and about to get better.

In 1983, Kenny’s contract with UA Records (by then Liberty Records) was up. He signed with RCA in a deal that paid a reported $20 million and gave him eventual ownership of the recordings. The first RCA LP, Eyes That See in the Dark, was produced by Albhy Galuten, Karl Richardson, and Barry Gibb, the team that had produced the Bee Gees’ songs on two of the best-selling LPs of all time, Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Gibb was one of the Bee Gees, and a major star in his own right. Collectively and individually, the Bee Gees wrote all the songs for Eyes That See in the Dark.

Inspired by the title of an Ernest Hemingway book, Islands in the Stream was conceived as a song for Diana Ross before it ended up on the shortlist for Eyes That See in the Dark. Kenny worked on it for four days before telling Gibb that he’d gone past the point of even liking the song. “Barry said, ‘You know what, this should be a duet,’” remembered Kenny. “‘And you know what, we should get Dolly Parton to do it.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s call her.’ And she said, ‘I’ll do it.’” Kenny was coming off a hit duet with Sheena Easton on We’ve Got Tonight, and Gibb realized that Islands in the Stream needed to be different. “It had to be a little more unusual,” he said. “Kenny and Dolly had never done a duet before, although they’d sung together on television. They were very loose with each other, very relaxed. They did all the vocals live. There were no separate overdubs from each artist.” Islands reached the top of the pop charts, the top of the country charts, and the top of many overseas charts. The Recording Industry Association of America certified two million sales before the end of 1983. In 2005, the song topped CMT’s poll of the best country duets of all time, and Kenny and Dolly reunited on the show to perform it.

Islands in the Stream was so successful that a follow-up was inevitable. Kenny and Dolly did a Christmas special in 1984 and toured together the following year. Portions of the tour were filmed for an HBO special. After that, Dolly went off to work with producer David Malloy on her Real Love LP. Malloy, who’d produced many of Eddie Rabbitt’s biggest hits, co-wrote the title song. “Dolly told me that Kenny owed her a favor because of Islands in the Stream,” he said later. “I said, ‘Well, let’s cash in on that favor and do a duet.’ The tricky part was that Dolly sounds good when the melodies move around kind of quick. Kenny does not sound good on melodies like that. He needs a longer note to get the sound of his throat established. You have to let him stretch out a bit to establish who he is.” One month after Kenny and Dolly’s HBO special aired, they shot back to No. 1 on the country charts with Real Love.

Another duet partner, Ronnie Milsap, gave Kenny the opportunity to reconnect with Kim Carnes. Kenny and Kim’s careers had crossed paths several times since they’d sung together in the New Christy Minstrels. She’d written some songs for the First Edition, and in 1980 she had created a country concept album for Kenny, Gideon, which yielded Kenny and Kim’s hit duet Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer. Four years later they had reunited, this time with James Ingram, for What About Me? And then, in 1987, when Kenny was on tour with fellow RCA act Ronnie Milsap, the two men needed a song they could perform together. Kenny remembered Make No Mistake, He’s Mine, a song that Kim had written for herself and Barbra Streisand. Kenny and Ronnie changed the gender and took the song to the top of the country charts. Make No Mistake, She’s Mine reached No. 1, but it would be Kenny’s last chart-topping hit for more than 10 years.

Beginning in the late ’80s, a change came over country music. Country radio embraced the new traditionalism of the younger guys, while some of the older performers, Kenny Rogers among them, found it harder to get airplay. But Kenny took it in stride. “There are so many pressures at the top that you begin intentionally or unintentionally to create your own demise,” he said. “You quit doing interviews, you do less shows, and you stop being creative. Eventually someone comes along and takes your place. There’s no status quo in this business. You’re either going up or down. When you’ve reached the pinnacle, and I think by any standards you’d have to say I reached it, it all becomes too easy, but when you don’t have the benefit of leaning on recent hits, you have to try harder to entertain the audience.”

After RCA, Kenny returned to Reprise, the branch of Warner Bros. Records that had signed the First Edition. With his old friend Jim Ed Norman producing, Kenny recorded one of his finest love songs, The Vows Go Unbroken (Always True to You), but when it exited the top 10 it once again seemed as if his chart career was over.

From the beginning, Kenny Rogers had kept one eye on the business side of the music business, and after leaving Reprise he decided that it was time to start his own record company. Back in 1979 when Capitol-EMI took over UA Records, UA had become part of EMI America under Jim Mazza. Kenny hadn’t forgotten all that Mazza had done for his career, and in 1998 they formed Dreamcatcher Entertainment to manage Kenny’s career and his enterprises.

Almost immediately, the new direction paid dividends. In 1999, Kenny returned to the upper reaches of the charts with two songs from his first Dreamcatcher album, She Rides Wild Horses. First into the charts was The Greatest, a classic story song with a twist ending that you never tire of hearing. It came from Don Schlitz, who’d written The Gambler. “Don has this incredible gift for taking a moment in my life or a moment in your life and putting it to music,” Kenny said later. “There’s a great philosophy that comes with that song.” Country radio couldn’t ignore it, and Kenny later published a children’s book based on the song. The Greatest peeked inside the country top 30 and set the stage for Buy Me a Rose, written by two amateur songwriters from Utah. When Kenny’s recording with Alison Krauss and Billy Dean reached No. 1, he became—at age 61—the oldest artist to top the country charts (a record that stood until Willie Nelson hit No. 1 at age 70).

Returning to the top of the charts after everyone has written you off is sweet enough, but this success was all the sweeter because it was on Kenny’s own label. Independent record companies only rarely cracked the country charts, and almost never reached the top. “Dreamcatcher,” Kenny said at the time, “has allowed me to release records and throw darts, for lack of a better term. What radio has said to me—and it has been a wonderful gift—is, ‘We’re not going to play mediocre records just because you were successful. If you make a great record that’s unlike anything anyone else has done, but it’s within the box, we’ll play it. We’ll give it a shot.’ I think if Buy Me a Rose had been released first, it would not have been nearly as big a record. But The Greatest, because of the uniqueness of that song, radio had to play it. There was nothing else like it. They were like, ‘That was pretty good. He’s not 30 years old, but people like it.’”

Fifty years after his records were a sensation in the sock hops around Houston, Kenny Rogers is a giant in the global entertainment business. His tours take him across the country and around the globe. Celebrating his music means that there’s so much about him we haven’t said. His charitable endeavors have quietly given a lot back to his community and to the country that has been so good to him. His books and exhibitions of photography tell stories with images the way his songs tell stories with words and music. And then there are the awards. Four Grammys, eleven People’s Choice Awards, eighteen American Music Awards, eight ACM Awards, eleven CMA Awards, and many more.

Most artists have a hard time stepping back and seeing themselves in a broader context. Kenny has always been philosophical and taken the long view. “You know what’s interesting,” he said during a recent tour of Ireland. “Success is never what drove me. I always loved the music. My mom told me when I was a kid, ‘Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ So when I found music, that’s how I felt about it. It wasn’t so much that I could make great money or do this, that or the other, it was that I could do everything that I truly loved for a living. Music is what I am, everything else is what I do. I’ve always felt that if a song touches me, I can make it touch other people. If it doesn’t touch me, I can’t really bring anything to it.”

Kenny Rogers projects an image, and the Kenny Rogers that people think they know is pretty close to the Kenny Rogers who looks at himself in the mirror. “I think we’re all three people,” he said. “We’re who we think we are, we’re who the audience thinks we are, and we’re who we really are. I think the closer those three people are together, the longer your career can last. If you look at Dolly Parton, she is what she is and she’s what she thinks she is. Look at Willie Nelson, he’s that way too. Johnny Cash was that way. Audiences don’t like to be tricked. They don’t like to think you’re something and find out you’re something else. I think that’s really the key to longevity.

“Plus good music and good songs.”

—COLIN ESCOTT
Nashville, June 2009