His mark on the modern musical landscape had been made, so much so that the band were even given their own blues-rock based musical variety television show. Follow-up songs such as the steamy ‘Something’s Burning’ showed a raunchy side to Rogers. ‘Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town’, the haunting but heartfelt pop ballad about a veteran, chimed in the desperate times of the Vietnam War and took the Number One spot in the NME Chart in 1969. It was then he finally started to find his own sound, drawing on hippy influences and bagging a chart hit in 1968 with a grungy, Western version of the Mickey Newbury-penned ‘Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)’, a song that scored a new lease of life after its far-out groove was featured on the soundtrack for The Big Lebowski.Ī year after their breakthrough and the band had changed their name to Kenny Rogers and The First Edition to reflect the star-quality of their big-sunglasses sporting and earring-wearing long-haired frontman. He went on to dabble with jazz, singing harmony and playing bass for singer Bobby Doyle until 1965, then worked as a session musician until he founded folksy rock band The New Edition in 1967. As a young man he scored his first hit in 1957 with swooning doo-wop single ‘The Crazy Feeling’, which showed no signs of the country music megastardom which awaited him. Yet he wasn’t always a dyed-in-wool honky-tonk hero.īorn in 1938 in Houston, Texas, Kenny Rogers started making music in the 1950s.

His perky, impossible-to-dislike version of ‘Islands in the Stream’, a duet with Dolly Parton, cemented his place in the country history books. One of the best-selling musicians of all time – he released 65 albums and sold in excess of 165 million records – Rogers dominated the charts of the 1970s and 1980s with his friendly, upbeat brand of mainstream country music. It’s a fitting song to honour the life and legacy of Rogers, who has passed away at the age of 81 of and whose death, in many ways, marks the end of an era.

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