Kenny Rogers: This Just Got Dark

The first impression Kenny Rogers made on me as a kid was an As-Seen-On-TV ad for a direct-marketed Kenny’s greatest hits album, with him on a dark stage and colored lights singing light fare like “Lady” and “You Decorated My Life.” 

Every time I saw Kenny Rogers – in cable-staple Six Pack, one of the 5 (count ‘em) movies made from his song “The Gambler”, as a relaxed guest on The Tonight Show or on a stage – I always got the impression that he was a nice guy.  That reputation has been backed up by so many people in entertainment, including his longtime manager Ken Kragen, also known as one of the nicest guys in music.   

So, it might come as a little bit of a shock that Kenny Rogers has recorded some of the darkest pop songs to ever get heavy radio rotation, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” and “Coward of the County.” 

“It Wasn’t Me That Started That Old Crazy Asian War” 

Sure, it’s a toe-tapper with a catchy kick-drum heartbeat and fingerpicking guitar solos.  But you are aware that this is the tale of a paralyzed veteran who routinely watches his wife leave to see other men and he contemplates killing her.  

Kenny goes dark.  What’s even more depressing is that Kenny doesn’t sound like a man losing control. The narrator sounds like someone resigned to this whole shitty situation and who’s been thinking about this for a long time.  

She’s leavin’ now ’cause I just heard the slammin’ of the door
The way I know I’ve heard it slam 100 times before
And if I could move, I’d get my gun and put her in the ground 

Oof. 

“And There Were Three of Them”

Guess what, “Coward of the County” is way darker than even “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”   

It’s my go-to karaoke song.  When I start, right up through the second verse it sounds like a charming crossover country song that seems to be a tale of an upright young man trying to live up to the standard his jailed father imparted to him.  Then the end of the second verse.  Boom. 

Years ago, Norm Macdonald was on the Adam Carolla radio show breaking this down and they described the lines that follow as an “emotional haymaker” that comes out of nowhere. 

One day while he was working, the Gatlin boys came calling 
They took turns at Becky an’ there was three of them 

At karaoke night, you can feel the air rush out of the room when I hit that spot.  And then you get the fake out that Tommy is going to chicken out but he has frontier justice on his mind: 

The Gatlin boys just laughed at him when he walked into the bar room 
One of them got up and met him half way cross the floor 
When Tommy turned around they said, “Hey look! Old Yellow’s leaving” 
But you could’ve heard a pin drop when Tommy stopped and locked the door 

Twenty years of crawling was bottled up inside him 
He wasn’t holding nothing back, he let ’em have it all 
When Tommy left the bar room, not a Gatlin boy was standing 
He said, “This one’s for Becky”, as he watched the last one fall 

It’s followed by a twist that, despite Tommy’s father’s wishes, “sometimes you have to fight to be a man.”  But the damage had been done by that point. 

All the while Kenny’s voice doesn’t get overly excited or even emotional at any point.  Ice cold. 

Oh, Those 1970’s 

These two Kenny examples of 1970s songwriting aren’t outliers.  There were routinely some really brutal songs out on the radio.  Where children listened in drive time.   

• The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia – Another country-pop classic.  It starts out rough enough with a murder and a wrongful execution.  Fine.  The sweet-voiced narrator reveals that she’s the actual killer.  

• Ode to Billie Joe – A family discusses ordinary dinner-table business while a young man’s suicide and the mystery surrounding it hangs in the air.  It sounds so down-home but make no mistake, this is dark. 

• Billy, Don’t Be a Hero – A young soldier ignores his girlfriend’s plea to stay out of danger and dies in battle. The upbeat arrangement and tragic ending do not fit.  At all.  By the way, the full Dewey Cox version of this song is not to be missed. 

• The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald – Gordon Lightfoot, like Kenny, can seem kind of milquetoast, but not when he sings about 28 sailors dying on a lake?! 
• Angie Baby – Helen Reddy has a similar soft rock feeling, perhaps the female Kenny Rogers.  This one is a sweet, tasty little pop song about a lonely girl who lives in a fantasy world, a creepy neighbor who, let’s face it, tries to rape her – and then a radio that may or may not swallow him whole. By the end, Angie has apparently disposed of a man through the power of her imagination and/or some kind of supernatural appliance.  I’m not kidding.
• Chevy Van – Sammy Johns’ not-quite hit is about a rambling guy with a windowless van.  The song isn’t quite as explicit, but a few listens and we can all tell what happened here.  The narrator picks up a teen runaway, fucks her, puts her out on the side of the road without her shoes, and he moves on with the whole thing being a pleasant memory for him. 

Seriously, look at the Billboard Hot 100 in any year of the 1970s.  This kind of gnarly truth cloaked in soft pop is omnipresent.  Even something like C.W. McCall’s 1975 CB-radio anthem “Convoy” by the end has truckers wanting to run over state troopers in an act of vehicular manslaughter. 

Maybe We Should Have Seen This Coming 

“Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” was recorded by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, well before Kenny’s amiable superstar image solidified. The song is a psychedelic trip with a genuinely unsettling edge. 

Kenny had a long and varied career.  

The killer about “Coward of the County” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” is that they both sound superficially similar to “The Gambler,” with light country arrangements and genial-sounding storyteller. But the narrative content is worlds darker than “The Gambler.” 

Just as Randy Newman is celebrated for singing through characters that don’t share his point of view, Kenny Rogers seemed to relish the idea of a pop-country character study, all the while remaining one of the most beloved stars in music. 

It’s important to remember, as Kramer says of him in the Kenny Roger’s Roasters episode of Seinfeld, “Kenny never hurt nobody!”