Within Two Years Lucille Turned Him Into A Solo Superstar
When the First Edition broke up Kenny Rogers said it felt like his life had lost its footing and he walked onstage alone and started over
When the First Edition broke up it was like my life had just lost all the footing
By the mid 1970s Kenny Rogers was hardly an unknown and the First Edition had already given him major pop and country hits including Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) and Ruby Donβt Take Your Love to Town
For years Rogers had been surrounded by the same musicians and the same road routine and the security of belonging to a group
Then the band ended and the First Edition broke apart in the mid 1970s as its members moved toward separate careers and Rogers later admitted the split hit him harder than outsiders might have expected
For the first time there was nobody behind him to absorb part of the pressure
He Had To Learn How To Stand Alone
Rogers signed with United Artists and began making records under his own name and the first releases produced modest results but nothing yet suggested that the 38 year old singer was about to become bigger than he had ever been with a band
Then he heard Lucille written by Roger Bowling and Hal Bynum and the song told a simple story of a woman leaves her husband in a bar and the man she leaves with later hears the side of the husband of what happened
Rogers recorded it in 1976 and released the following year Lucille went to No. 1 country and No. 5 pop and won Rogers a Grammy and was named CMA Single of the Year
More importantly it solved the identity problem and Rogers was no longer the singer from a psychedelic pop group trying to continue on his own
Lucille revealed exactly what would carry the next phase of his career with a rough conversational voice and story songs about ordinary people making painful choices
The Breakup Became The Beginning
The Gambler and She Believes in Me and Coward of the County followed soon afterward and between 1977 and 1987 Rogers accumulated twenty No. 1 country hits
The story in his voice was strong enough to hold the room by itself once the band was gone
The First Edition had taught Kenny Rogers how to stand in front of an audience and its breakup forced him to find out what would happen when he had to stand there by himself
And the footing he lost became the road he had to walk