Rogers, Kenny, 1938-2020

Kenneth Ray Rogers entered country music with a broad musical background. Growing up in public housing in Houston, he was exposed to R&B, pop, and jazz in addition to country.

Rogers’s first professional group was a late-1950s vocal act called the Scholars, which had local hits in Houston. His doo-wop recording “That Crazy Feeling,” a 1958 solo hit on Carlton Records, earned him an appearance on American Bandstand.

During the early 1960s, Rogers played bass, and occasionally sang, in a Houston jazz trio. Membership in the New Christy Minstrels folk group spurred the founding of the First Edition, in which Rogers and other former Minstrels mixed folk, rock, and country sounds. The new group went #5 pop in 1967 with Mickey Newbury’s psychedelic “Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition Was In)” and gained several additional pop hits on Reprise Records.

<p>Kenneth Ray Rogers Sr. (August 21, 1938 – March 20, 2020) was an American singer and songwriter. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2013. Rogers was particularly popular with country audiences but also charted more than 120 hit singles across various genres, topping the country and pop album charts for more than 200 individual weeks in the United States alone. He sold more than 100 million records worldwide during his lifetime, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. His fame and career spanned multiple genres: jazz, folk, pop, rock, and country. He remade his career and was one of the most successful cross-over artists of all time. <p>
<p>Rogers' albums The Gambler and Kenny were featured in the About.com poll of "The 200 Most Influential Country Albums Ever". He was voted the "Favorite Singer of All Time" in a 1986 joint poll by readers of both USA Today and People. He received numerous awards, such as the AMAs, Grammys, ACMs, and CMAs, as well as a lifetime achievement award for a career spanning six decades in 2003.Later success included the 2006 album release Water & Bridges, an across-the-board hit that entered the top 5 in the Billboard Country Albums sales charts, also charting in the top 15 of the Billboard 200. The first single from the album, "I Can't Unlove You", was also a sizable chart hit. Remaining a popular entertainer around the world, he continued to tour regularly until his retirement in 2017.<p>
<p>Rogers had acting roles in movies and television shows, including the title roles in Kenny Rogers as The Gambler, the MacShayne series for The NBC Mystery Movie, and the 1982 feature film Six Pack. He was a co-founder of the restaurant chain Kenny Rogers Roasters in collaboration with former KFC CEO John Y. Brown Jr. Although the stores closed in the United States, they are still a fixture in Asia.<p>