I'm So GRATEFUL I Got The Chance to INTERVIEW This LEGEND Before He Passed Away | Professor of Rock
3,695Coming up next is an interview with Kenny Rogers, a legend we lost a few years back… He was voted the greatest singer in the world several times by the people, and today’s song, The Gambler, his most famous one, is a major reason why… It’s a song that everyone knows and loves, even if they won’t admit it. It’s a song that changed the fortune of a computer programmer forever. A tech guy who was working a graveyard shift wrote the song, and in the process, he elevated a middle-aged singer whom the pundits said was done. They said at 40 Kenny was way past his prime, over the hill, they said his career was over, and left him for dead. But The Gambler launched him into superstardom. The song was so good that it became a hit TV movie and a metaphor that’s been used a million times. Up next, the making of a storybook song that grabbed an indelible piece of pop culture… in his own words. next on professor of rock.
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Whether you’ve ever played poker or not, you’ve no doubt applied a poker idiom to some situation in your everyday life."Ace in the hole, "Card up your sleeve,” "It’s not in the cards,” "Sweeten the pot,” “Up the ante”. Those are just a few of the many gambling expressions that are used in our daily vernacular. But the poker phrase that grabbed an indelible piece in pop culture was..”You gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em,” - immortalized in Kenny Rogers’s 1978, multi-format landmark…” The Gambler.” Our latest entry into the New Standards, where we celebrate a song that transcends everything and stands the test of time across generations, and today we even have an interview with the man himself.
So “The Gambler” was written in ‘76 by an unknown songwriter from North Carolina, named Don Schlitz. The inspiration came to Don during a stroll back home from a guitar session on the famed Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee. Schlitz wrote most of the song, in his head, during that 20-minute jaunt, including the iconic chorus, but he had no idea what triggered it. The idea seemed to come out of nowhere, but Don believes that it was a gift from the spirit of his late father, who had recently passed.
Don called his father “the best man I’ve ever known.” During an interview for American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, Schlitz said that after he typed out much of the song’s lyrics, it took him another 6 weeks to settle on an ending that completed “The Gambler.” He called the conclusion of his narrative his “Guy de Maupassant ending.” Maupassant was a 19th-century French author that Schlitz admired. He was largely regarded as the ‘father of the modern short story.'
What happens at the end of “The Gambler" is a bit mysterious… The last line in verse four of “The Gambler” leaves the listener hanging, as Maupassant had a penchant to do in his novellas. “And in his final words, I found an ace that I could keep.” Did the old, drifting gambler die? We’re not really sure, however, his wisdom… lives eternal. Although Schlitz felt he had written an “interesting story,” when “The Gambler” was presented as a song for licensing, it appeared to be a throwaway.
Don dropped out of Duke and moved to Nashville to be a songwriter...