Country music legend Kenny Rogers has died at age 81.
The singer-songwriter, often credited with helping to blur the lines between country and pop, was belatedly inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2013.“I think part of it is that there’s a certain amount of resentment that I made country go pop, and yet I think it actually added a lot of viewers to it,”that same year. “As you can see now, it’s so much more pop than where I took it.”
. “I never meant to do that, but on some of the songs through the years, like ‘She Believes in Me’ or ‘You Decorated My Life,’ those are notRogers believed he took country music to a mainstream audience, and he was instantly recognized for his signature look: a neatly trimmed beard and flared shirt collars. He modeled his aesthetic after “Grizzly Adams” star Dan Haggerty for a particular reason. When he started out in his first group, the First Edition, he was the oldest member..
His sandy-edged voice conveyed the heart-wrenching tales of “Lady’s” knight in shining armor, the advice-dealing “Gambler” and “Lucille’s” lovelorn father left with four hungry kids and a crop in the fields.“There’s a fine line between being driven and being selfish,” Rogers wrote in his bestselling 2012 memoir, “Luck or Something Like It.”Staying on the road six months at a time without going home during his early marriages was among those selfish acts.
Rogers was born Kenneth Donald Rogers in 1938, the fourth child of Edward Floyd and Lucille Lois Hester Rogers, who had eight children in all. His heritage was mixed: Irish on his mother’s side and potentially Native American on his father’s because of his grandmother, Della Rogers.
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