Kenny Rogers' career in music has spanned five
decades.It started out when he
was in high school with a band called The Scholars that landed a record
deal and actually had a couple of hits.He scored his first solo hit, "That
Crazy Feeling", in 1958, and played stand-up bass for The Bobby Doyle
Trio, a jazz outfit that had a recording contract with Columbia.In 1966, he joined The New Christy
Minstrels, and a year later, he and fellow bandmates
Thelma Camacho, Mike Settle and Terry Williams defected to found The First
Edition.Their first hit was "I
Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)".The condition was this:Kenny Rogers was the star of the
show.It was his name that
became affixed to the front of the band's name.Kenny Rogers & The First Edition
scored a crossover hit with the Mel Tillis-penned
"Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town" and soon had their
own variety programme on television.They broke up in 1974.Rogers, torn between country and pop, but
disenfranchised with the fickleness of the latter, signed with United
Artists in 1976.A year later, "Lucille"
would have gone higher than #1 if it could have, selling over five million
copies worldwide.A string of
hits would follow including Kenny's personal favourite,
"The Gambler", which was so popular it spawned a TV movie and
four sequels.The biggest hit
of his career was penned and produced by Lionel Richie,
with whom he would become good friends. " Lady", released in
1980, hit #1 the on the Billboard Country, Adult Contemporary, and Pop
charts.Three years later, "Islands in the Stream", a Bee Gees song that he
recorded with Dolly Parton, managed the same.It would be the last country song to
hit #1 on the pop charts for the next seventeen years.There was a shift in pop music away
from country and towards rock:Likewise, there was a shift in country music away from pop and back
to country.This left in-betweeners like Rogers
to fight it out amongst themselves on the Adult Contemporary charts.Nevertheless, he continued to
chart:He hit the top forty
twenty-three times between 1983 and 1990, including a few #1s.As the hits became fewer and further
between, Rogers began to pursue other interests besides music:He took up photography and was so
good at it he wound up selling several books, and was even invited to shoot
a portrait of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.He wrote an off-broadway
musical entitled The Toy Shoppe
and it proved to be a good touring vehicle for him.In the meantime, he continued to
record moreso for pleasure than aspirations of
chart success, including an album of standards, Timepiece, in 1994, and Vote
For Love, an unusual experiment in that it was an album of requests
voted on by QVC viewers (and the first album to be released by QVC's own label).In 1999, he started his own record
label, Dreamcatcher Entertainment, by virtue of
which he would capture the brass ring on the country charts once again,
when "Buy Me A Rose" went to #1, making Kenny Rogers the oldest
singer to accomplish that feat, at 61, since Hank Snow.(It was a record later to be
shattered by Willie Nelson, at 70.)Rogers
continues to perform, and record:His last album, Water and
Bridges, was released in March 2006, and greatest-hits packages
continue to sell worldwide.
