By the time he passed-on March 20, 2020, at age 81-he’d been recording for more than 60 years.īorn in 1938 and raised one of eight kids in a Houston housing project, Rogers had his musical epiphany at 12, watching Ray Charles live-it seemed cool, he thought, to have everyone clap when you sang and laugh when you talked. Someone for that eight-to-80 demographic. Another is that Rogers-handsome, genial, husky-voiced, and bushy-bearded-was just the kind of guy people liked to listen to and look at, a natural entertainer who split the difference between the earthiness of country and the sophistication of pop and adult contemporary. That’s one way to explain selling 100 million albums or so. Kenny Rogers used to say he had two kinds of songs: ballads that capture what men want to say and women want to hear, and stories that put a listener in a place.
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