Original version is on the 1970 album Something's Burning with The First Edition. This is a 1978 re-recording from Ten Years of Gold Original version is on the 1969 album Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town with The First Edition. George Richey/ Billy Sherrill/ Tammy Wynette " 'Til I Can Make It on My Own" (with Dottie West) " Don't Fall in Love with a Dreamer" (with Kim Carnes) Original version on the 1969 album Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town with The First Edition. " We've Got Tonight" (with Sheena Easton) Another version came in 1987 (see below). The single that first appeared on Rogers' first solo Greatest Hits collection in 1980, " Lady" also makes it onto the album, as does "Love Lifted Me" from 1976 (his first solo single in ten years following his split with The First Edition).Īlso included are popular duets with Sheena Easton (" We've Got Tonight"), Kim Carnes (" Don't Fall in Love with a Dreamer"), and Dottie West ("Till I Can Make It on My Own").īased on hit singles from the Billboard charts, this is the strongest Kenny Rogers single disc compilation album released. " The Gambler" – Rogers' chart-topping story song – also makes an appearance.
This compilation covers the entire span of Rogers' glorious chart run through the late 1970s and early 1980s.Īmong the 20 tracks on the album is Rogers' early smash hit " Lucille", which made Rogers a world-famous solo superstar. A gamble, you could say.20 Greatest Hits marks Rogers' third compilation album as a solo artist.
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(That Rogers also figured out how to act-including starring in a series of made-for-TV movies based on “The Gambler”-didn’t hurt he said all he had to do was be himself in different clothes.) Mellow as the music is, and modest as he was about it, Rogers also broke down boundaries and cleared the way for new combinations of sounds and styles-a chance he took on his inspiration and won. His biggest songs-“The Gambler,” “Lady,” the Dolly Parton duet “Islands in the Stream”-remain the stock-in-trade of karaoke nights and television ads, the kind of music one learns not by discovery but by cultural osmosis. He went on to become one of country music’s first and biggest mainstream superstars, an arena-packing presence who paved the way for artists such as Shania Twain and Garth Brooks, reshaping our sense of what country was and how it figured into the pop landscape. Enter “Lucille,” which Rogers’ manager figured would either be laughed off as a novelty or take over country music.
(The name was aspirational, Rogers said later-they were C students at best.) After stints playing upright bass in a jazz trio and folk-pop with The New Christy Minstrels, Rogers formed The First Edition, whose biggest tracks-most notably “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” which you’d probably recognize from its use in The Big Lebowski-mixed light psychedelia with country and R&B.īy the end of the band’s run, Rogers was scraping by as a pitchman for a home guitar course and closing in on 40. He started his first band, the Scholars, in high school, with a guitar bought using busboy tips. 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.