He refused to save his most important words for a eulogy. In the 1980s Kenny Rogers brought his finished poem directly to Lucille Lois Hester and read it to her while her health and mind were still sharp, determined to let her know while she was still living how deeply he cared.
Things would either work out or eventually pass.
Rogers returned to that steady wisdom from his mother for the rest of his life, just as he explained in his October 2012 autobiography Luck or Something Like It, A Memoir. Everything he knew about endurance started with Lucille inside Houston’s San Felipe Courts, where he was born on August 21, 1938, at St. Joseph’s Infirmary as Kenneth Donald Rogers, though his mother always called him Kenneth Ray, especially when he was in trouble.
He was the fourth of eight children crowded into a three bedroom apartment in the Fourth Ward federal housing project. His father Edward Floyd Rogers was a warm hearted carpenter whose heavy drinking regularly drained the household paychecks, while Lucille worked grueling shifts as a hospital nurse’s assistant and ironed laundry at night for wealthier Houston families to keep eight children fed and clothed.
Without self pity Lucille carried the family through the Fourth Ward, stretching every dollar while encouraging her son to buy his first guitar and become the first member of the family to graduate from Jefferson Davis High School. Watching her gave him a fierce drive to escape poverty.
Once his solo career exploded in the late 1970s, ironically propelled by his 1977 Grammy winning smash “Lucille,” a song about a fictional woman that became a running joke between mother and son, Rogers made sure she never worried about bills again. In the 1980s, after crossover hits like “The Gambler” and “Lady” put him at the top of the charts, he bought Lucille her own customized tour bus with a full time driver, and whenever she wanted to travel from Crockett, Texas, to visit relatives or catch one of his concerts, she simply telephoned her driver Alan and announced she was ready to roll.
Yet even after moving his mother out of working class Houston and handing her the keys to a luxury coach, Rogers remained troubled by what money could not fix. At the height of a relentless international touring schedule in the 1980s, flying from arena to arena in his forties, he noticed how brief his visits home had become, often hurrying past his aging mother in the kitchen with his mind already on the next flight instead of stopping to put his arms around her shoulders, and he sat down and wrote a private poem for her titled “How Long Has It Been.”
Raised in a Texas household where working class men rarely spoke openly about their emotions, Rogers turned his regret into verses. The poem opened with direct questions asking how much time had passed since a grown child last kissed a mother’s cheeks, held her hand, took the time to stand straight before her, or said “I love you, Mom” out loud.
Looking back at the woman who had held their San Felipe Courts apartment together, Rogers wrote that mothers had to be forged from iron to raise their children through the hardest years, only to watch those same sons and daughters walk out the door into busy lives right when old age made their company matter most. In those lines he acknowledged the quiet nights his seemingly unbreakable mother had spent crying alone while missing her grown family.
Speaking with Billboard in May 2015, Rogers explained he had written the piece simply because he wanted Lucille to know while she was still living that he cared about her at that level. Lucille passed away in 1991 at age eighty, nearly three decades before Rogers died at age eighty one in March 2020.
When the singer finally published “How Long Has It Been” for the first time on Mother’s Day in May 2015 alongside a smiling photograph of the two of them, thousands of grown sons and daughters recognized their own hurried lives in his questions and picked up the telephone to call home. Years later in May 2023, the singer’s estate released those same verses again beside previously unseen family home movie footage showing Rogers walking through the door to surprise a beaming Lucille in her living room.