Liberty 1072
Producers: Larry Butler, Kenny Rogers, and Lionel Richie
Track listing: The Gambler / Lady / Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer / Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town / She Believes in Me / Coward of the County / Lucille / You Decorated My Life / Reuben James / Love the World Away / Every Time Two Fools Collide / Long Arm of the Law
December 13, 1980
2 weeks
Veteran country singer Kenny Rogers scored nine top 40 pop hits with producer Larry Butler from 1977 through 1980, but the collaboration was beginning to get a little stale. “The time had come for me to do something totally different,” Rogers says. “We realized that the songs were beginning to sound the same and we were living off past glories.”
Rogers was searching for something fresh to add to his planned Greatest Hits album. “I heard ‘Three Times a Lady’ by the Commodores on the radio. I happened to know the owner of Motown Records, Berry Gordy, and I asked him if he thought Lionel Richie would be interested in writing something for me.” Gordy passed the message over to Richie, who agreed to meet Rogers in Las Vegas. “We talked and I told him what I wanted,” Rogers recalls. “He came back a week later and said, ‘Here’s what I had written for you.’ The only word he had was ‘Lady,’ but the music was so beautiful. I agreed to do the song off of that one word.”
Rogers had a specific reason for wanting to work with Richie. “I had remembered that Ray Charles had sung to country tracks. I thought that was so clever, because there is such a finite difference between country and R&B. What I wanted to do was sing country to R&B tracks. I went to Lionel and said, ‘Don’t change your tracks, but just let me sing it my way.’ And we were very successful with that approach.”
So successful that on November 15, 1980, “Lady” became Rogers’s first Number One single. It was still at the top of the Hot 100 a month later when Greatest Hits knocked Barbra Streisand’s Guilty from the Number One spot on the album chart. “I think the single and the album kind of cross-fed each other,” Rogers says. “The album was such a huge success because we introduced a new song and it turned out to be Number One. And part of the reason the single ended up going to Number One was because it was part of a greatest-hits album, which was a big package.”
Indeed, there was much more to Greatest Hits than just “Lady.” The album spanned Rogers’s career from 1969 through 1980, going back to number six hit “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” written by Mel Tillis recorded by Rogers and the First Edition. By 1973, Rogers had gone solo. He went on to experience his greatest success with such hits as 1977’s “Lucille,” which peaked at number five and 1978’s “The Gambler,” which climbed to number 16. “That’s one that is so strongly associated with me that I’m known as ‘the Gambler’ to foreign countries,” Rogers says The song also inspired a series of movies starring Rogers.
Much like Johnny Cash and later Garth Brooks, Rogers proved that country music had mainstream appeal. “My intent always was to do country songs that would sell pop, with the understanding that when the market got big enough and the pie got larger, I would then do pop that would sell country,” Rogers says. “I’ve always had this theory that country music is what country people will buy.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of December 13, 1980
1 . Greatest Hits, Kenny Rogers
2. Guilty, Barbra Streisand
3. Hotter Than July, Stevie Wonder
4. The River, Bruce Springsteen
5. Back in Black, AC/DC