Tears choked the voice of legendary country icon Kenny Rogers on October 1 2012 as he opened up about the deep emotional weight of his relationship with his late father Edward Floyd Rogers
For nearly forty years following his father passing away in Houston on July 9 1975 the famous singer had reflexively reduced a complex man down to a single painful label starting nearly every conversation by stating that his father was an alcoholic
Was that single flaw truly all you saw in the man
That piercing question from a close friend and marriage counselor during the preparation of his memoir Luck or Something Like It utterly stopped Rogers in his tracks and shattered decades of unspoken resentment
Growing up alongside his seven siblings in the cramped San Felipe Courts federal housing project in Houston young Kenny had watched his father struggle as a post Depression carpenter earning no more than seventy five dollars a week to feed ten mouths while his mother Lucille managed what little money they had
Because Floyd passed away just as Kenny was stepping into his iconic solo superstardom with hits like Lucille and The Gambler the busy young artist never found the time to sit down and understand the crushing humiliation and unfulfilled dreams his father carried
Looking past the bottle however Rogers remembered a warm deeply humorous storyteller who never once raised a hand against his wife or children and stayed fiercely loyal to Lucille through every hardship
I realized how unfair I had been to erase a lifetime of hard work and kindness with a single label
This profound realization deeply mirrored Rogers own journey through fatherhood across his marriages from his early years of painful estrangement from his older children to the profound second chance he received at age sixty five raising his young twin sons Justin and Jordan
Determined never to let another generation be divided by misunderstandings Rogers dedicated his later years to staying home with his family ensuring his boys would always know the grace truth and resilience of the poor Houston carpenter who shared their family name