Willie Nelson Turned Down Kenny Rogers Offer to Cut ‘The Gambler’
Despite being 87-years-old and quarantined due to COVID-19, Willie Nelson is staying busy as always, releasing his 70th studio record First Rose of Spring on July 3rd, headlining a virtual presentation of his annual 4th of July Picnic, and planning a new book with his piano-playing sister called Me and Sister Bobbie due out September 15th.
But that is not all. During a recent interview with Jenna Bush on The Today Show, Willie dropped quite a few nuggets about some other things he has coming up, including a tribute to his friend and running buddy Roger Miller, and another to one of his musical heroes he’s toasted before, Frank Sinatra.
“Well, like everybody else, just kind of hiding out, hanging out, hunkered down,” Willie responded when Jenna Bush asked him what he’s been doing during the quarantine. “It’s no fun, especially for an old guitar picker … My son Lukas is here, and my son Micah is coming in, and we’re going to do some recording in the studio. We’re doing a Roger Miller album, and I’m doing another Sinatra album. So I’m trying to stay busy.”
Willie and Roger Miller go way back to when they both did time in Ray Price’s backing band The Cherokee Cowboys. Willie Nelson released another tribute album to Sinatra called My Way in 2018 after regularly covering Sinatra songs over the years.
But a new batch of tribute records was not the only nugget Willie Nelson dropped in the interview. He also told the story of how he once turned down recording “The Gambler.” Written by Don Schlitz, it became the signature song for Kenny Rogers when Kenny released it in 1978.
“He tried to get me to record ‘The Gambler,'” Willie says of Kenny Rogers, who passed away on March 20th. “We were somewhere, I don’t know. He said, ‘I got this song here, I think you should do it.’ And he played it for me, and I said, ‘It’s a great song, but I don’t think I’ll do it’ because I was doing every night a song called ‘The Red Headed Stranger’ which has 100 verses in it, and it’s a long song. And I said I just don’t want to do another long song, and I can’t quit doing ‘Red Headed Stranger.’ So he said, ‘Okay, I’ll record it myself.’ And so he did, and there it is.”
When asked if Willie had any regrets turning down the song, he said, “No, that was Kenny’s song all the way.”
It’s hard to contemplate the alternative country music universe where Willie Nelson recorded “The Gambler” instead of Kenny. But it’s sometimes those key decisions that lend to some of the biggest songs ending up in the right hands. For example, Garth Brooks wanted George Strait to cut “Friends in Low Places,” which ended up being the breakout hit for Brooks. Who knows if “The Gambler” would have been a hit for Willie, or “Friends in Low Places” a smash for Strait. But it’s hard to argue those songs didn’t end up right where they needed to be.
Erikstein
July 12, 2020 @ 10:34 am
Willie is the living embodiment of Country music.Humble and sincere.God bless him.
Happy Dan
July 12, 2020 @ 10:35 am
Great story, thanks Trig!
Big Tex
July 12, 2020 @ 11:03 am
Congratulations to Nelson for the Roger Miller tribute. Anything to preserve and promote Miller’s legacy is great!
I still recall many of Roger’s stories, with my favorite being the one about an event that occurred during his stint as a service station attendant in Amarillo. A lot of the service station equipment was running, making lots of noise, when a well-dressed woman drove up, got out of her Cadillac, and approached Miller with a question.
She asked, “Do you have a rest room?”
Trying to hear above the noise, Miller misunderstood, thinking she had said, “Do you have a whisk broom?”
Miller responded, “Just back it up over here, lady, and we’ll blow it out with the hose.”
Cody
July 12, 2020 @ 1:14 pm
Can’t say I’m surprised, seemed everyone was cutting “The Gambler” that year – Cash’s album with it dropped a few days before Kenny’s single and Bare’s album with it came out sometime that year, and better in my opinion.
Luckyoldsun
July 12, 2020 @ 4:48 pm
This was already on another country music site.
Strikes me as kind of silly.
The suggestion is that Kenny Rogers’ career hit “The Gambler” was a brand new song when he recorded it and that Kenny first offered it to Willie Nelson and that Willie could have had the huge hit, but turned it down.
But, in fact, “The Gambler” had been recorded and put on on an album by Bobby Bare a few years before Kenny recorded it, the song had also been issued as a single by its writer, Don Schlitz, and Johnny Cash also recorded it around the same time as Kenny.
In fact, anybody was free to record the song at the time and Willie Nelson–and his producers–were certainly aware of the song.
Kenny Rogers had a knack for making hits out of songs that had not done nearly as well for other artists. Same thing happened with “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” which had been a minor hit for a now largely forgotten artist, Johnny Darrell, before Kenny made it into another career-defining smash.
The story of how Kenny Rogers came to record “The Gambler” was told many times by Rogers, himself.
Sounds to me like this story that Willie Nelson is suddenly telling may simply be a common case of an 87-year-old artist who’s forgotten a lot of details of an extraordinarily long and eventful career.
Kevin Smith
July 12, 2020 @ 5:04 pm
Kenny’s version is the definitive one period. I seriously doubt Willie’s would have been better. And I love Willie. Same with Bare, im a Bare fan too. I’m gonna give it to Rogers all the way on this one. He OWNED that song. It still stands as one of the great solid country gold classics. And it will 50 years from now. But I agree with Lucky Sun above in that those guys often recorded songs others had hits with but only one is usually the definitive. Other example : Yesterdays Wine written by Willie. The definitive version of it was by Haggard and Jones. Of course its Willie’s song but their version perfected it. Ed Bruce wrote Mamas don’t let your baby’s grow up to be cowboys, but Willie and Waylon are the definitive take. And on it goes.
albert
July 12, 2020 @ 7:51 pm
a little love for the real genius behind that song …..don schlitz .
there isn’t a contemporary writer out there who comes close . but in absolute fairness , would we even know if there was one …..the lamestream would certainly never play it today .
Brian
July 13, 2020 @ 5:05 am
I liked the era where multiple artists wold cut the same song, I think it gave great songs a better chance to be heard. I mean even artists most people on here don’t like record some incredible songs, but they are buried on their album and you never really get to hear them. It would be cool if more traditional artists just took the song and put it out as a single. Right now, if Jason Aldean were to ask a songwriter for a song, he would basically get it guaranteed and while the writer would make money, it doesn’t make near as much as a released single that became a hit would. It would be cool to see other artists pick those songs up and give them a chance to really be a hit, which can change the financial life of a songwriter.
Anthony
July 18, 2020 @ 10:17 am
I agree, Brian. More chance for a song to be heard, for someone to perhaps record the definitive version, and more chance for a song to become a standard. I think one of the reasons why the modern era is producing fewer standards is that a song is unlikely to be cut by a second artist anytime soon, especially if the first artist wasn’t the writer.
Saul V. Ambulando
July 13, 2020 @ 8:24 am
I was having a discussion with a friend recently as to who ought to be considered the same “sort” of artist as Willie, Kenny, Waylon, Merle, Robert Earl Keane, Jerry Jeff, etc. And we more or less agreed that the current artists who appeared to have the same sort of aim and relationship were guys like Colter Wall, Ian Noe, Vincent Neil Emerson, and Charley Crockett (note: my friend also argued for Cody Jinks on this front, but I can’t speak to whether or not he fits in to what I’m saying here. I like Cody’s Adobe Sessions and enjoy his most recent pair of albums, but I don’t spin him up enough to say for certain one way or another) – guys who (at least on occasion) tour together, play the same venues, cover and appear on each others’ songs, etc.
I admit I’m probably being romantic about it a bit, but there’s something to this story that seems integral to the core of what most of us understand to be at the core of country music – that while the artists are (obviously) key players, the songs exist as entities unto themselves and contribute to the vitality and well-being of the “genre of country” as a whole. The only other genre where this seems to me to be remotely prevalent is rock – where covering another band’s/artist’s song can be as vital to the artistry as the song-writing process itself. Contrariwise, I don’t have any interest in, say, Eminem and Jay-Z covering each other’s songs.
To me, that speaks to a specific distinction between what country aims at as opposed to what other genres might aim at. Country tends to conceive of itself as an investment – something paid into from which the investors (read: both the artist and the fan) can receive consistent return. As a specific example, I plan to keep both Eddy Alexander’s original “Cowpoke” and Colter Wall’s (in my opinion, superior cover of) “Cowpoke” in rotation on exactly the same playlist. Other popular genres (at least now-a-days) seem to think of their songs as consumer products: you throw it out there and soak up as many downloads as you can and then move on to the next single or next album and try and strike the balance between core identity and novelty for the sake of continuing to drive sales.
This is not to say that country artists are above the game of consumerism, but rather simply to point out that covers (especially) and collaborations (to a lesser genre-specific extent; rap collaborations are fairly common) play a vital and beloved part of country in a way that they don’t seem to in other popular genres of music.
I’ve argued before that country music is a uniquely and specifically conservative genre, which is to say that although its subject matter does not necessarily have to speak to any specific (politically) conservative value or virtue, its aim seems to be “elegiac folk music with twang.” Covering another artist’s song(s) plays into that: it’s both dogma and praxis of paying your dues, acknowledging what came before, and embracing the goodness of both.
This is also why Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson can fuck all the way off.
Dee Manning
July 13, 2020 @ 10:52 am
Today’s country fans, and many, many artists, would vehemently disagree about the conservative part. And of all the artists I’ve checked out because of this site, Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell are my favorites. (Also like Kassi Ashton, Rattlesnake Milk and Cody Jinks).
Benny Lee
July 13, 2020 @ 9:24 pm
Willie told this story years ago, in an interview; I forget if it was Charlie Rose or Larry King.
Pat Fitzpatrick
July 19, 2020 @ 6:24 pm
Since its mentioned in the article, a similar situation happened with Friends in Low Places – Mark Chestnut also recorded it. Mark treated it as a somber country song, and Garth had fun with it, which is why Garth’s was a hit.
Bill711
July 28, 2020 @ 4:31 am
I think that Willie should do an album (original or covers, it doesn’t really matter) with Kris Kristofferson, Bobby Bare and Loretta Lynn while they are still alive. They are the most known last survivors of country music.