kenny rogers on tour

At 72, Kenny Rogers is the father of six-year-old twins and still performing 100 dates a year, mixing his new country-pop songs with the old hits in a crowd-pleasing formula.

Rogers says his roots are in country, as his father played fiddle and his mother loved Hank Williams. But Rogers who began as a doo-wop singer, spent 10 years in a jazz trio, then fronted folk-rockers The First Edition before heading out to Nashville.
That was 1976 and by 1977, he'd had a huge hit with Lucille, a song he still sings today, with The Gambler coming a year later.

"I've always said that I look for two types of songs," he said. "There's a man's song which is Lucille, Coward of the County. And then there's a female song like She Believes in Me, You Decorated My Life, Buy Me a Rose, all of those songs. For the women, I like to find a song that says what every man would like to say and every woman would like to hear," Rogers said.

"The men's songs….those are really movie scripts. The trick is to tell you where you are when you start — 'on a warm summer's day on a train bound for nowhere' — take you on a journey, drop you off on an emotion."