Kenny Rogers Cites Ray Charles As His Greatest Influence
"I asked him one time, ‘Ray, how do you know when to sing those little licks?’ He said, ‘Kenny, if you have to ask, they’re wrong,’” Rogers shared.
Kenny Rogers has charted over 100 singles and sold over 100 million albums over his six-decade career. When someone is that successful for so long, they must have drawn influence from quite a spectacular source. For Rogers, that source was soul legend Ray Charles.
“Ray Charles was my influence. When I was 12 years old, I went to see Ray Charles, and I came home that night, and I didn’t even know I could sing, but I told my mom, ‘I know what I want to do. I want to sing.’ Everybody clapped for him after he sang, and they laughed at everything he said. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s gotta make him feel great,’” Rogers recalled fondly.
Not only was Charles an inspiration to Rogers, he also became a friend. In 1979, Charles appeared on Roger’s variety television special A Special Kenny Rogers. The pair did a duet of Lloyd Price’s “Oh Lady Luck.”
“He kind of set a good example for me, and he became a good friend of mine. We worked together many times. I’ve always loved his sincerity, his simplicity, and the things he does,” Rogers said.
As for one of the best lessons Charles taught Rogers?
“I asked him one time, ‘Ray, how do you know when to sing those little licks?’ He said, ‘Kenny, if you have to ask, they’re wrong,’” Rogers shared.
Both Rogers and Charles were lauded for their crossover success an integration of new styles of music. Rogers was honored for doing so in 2015 with the CMT Artists of the Year Artist of a Lifetime award. In his speech, Rogers credited Charles’s concert for being the pivotal moment that started his career. If it were not for Ray Charles, country music fans might not ever have known Kenny Rogers. If that were the case, they might not ever have known Billy Currington either.
When Currington was a kid, he remembers knowing all the words to Rogers’s songs and admiring him. He finally got to see the superstar in concert on his tour with Dolly Parton, which said was a “magical moment.”
“[What] I loved mostly about Kenny was that he’s so universal. He could sing ‘The Gambler’ and all those really country-type songs, but then he could sing ‘Lady’ and all the pop-type sounding songs, and that he was able to do that on one genre of music, which was mostly country radio,” said Currington. “I really admired that, and I always wanted to be like him. He parted his hair in the middle, and that’s what I did as a kid. All my pictures as a kid, I’ve got this part straight down the middle in feathers.”
Kenny Rogers is currently finishing up his final tour, The Gambler’s Last Deal.
