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Kenny Rogers, Country Music Hall of Famer, four-time Grammy winner, and all-around pop culture icon, died of natural causes at the age of 81 in his Georgia home, according to a report from TMZ. Rogers was best known for his string of country-flavored crossover hits of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including “The Gambler,” “The Coward of The County,” “Lady,” and “Islands In The Stream,” and was popular enough to be a featured soloist in the landmark 1985 recording of “We Are The World.” (Bet you didn’t know that it was recorded at Kenny Rogers’ studio, though!)
Rogers’ star shined so brightly that his fame couldn’t be contained solely by the Billboard charts. In the ’70s, he broke into acting, racking up 24 credited appearances across television and movies throughout his career. As we remember his outsized impact on popular culture, here are six of the most memorable moments from this warm-voiced country crooner.
'The Muppet Show'
Kenny Rogers was the guest host of an episode of The Muppet Show that originally aired in October of 1979 (Episode 410, for your Muppet completists out there). He sang a duet of his famed hit “The Gambler” with a Muppet character known as, you guessed it, The Gambler. The way that Jim Henson chose to frame this number (and The Gambler’s shocking death) adds an extra layer of emotional poignancy to Rogers’ rousing sing-along.
'The Gambler'
The runaway, crossover chart success of “The Gambler” led Kenny Rogers to star a made-for-TV movie called Kenny Rogers as The Gambler. The movie aired on CBS on April 8, 1980, and was a major Nielsen hit. It earned two Emmy nominations, and eventually spun off four sequels (of ever-lessening quality) over the course of the next 15 years.
'Six Pack'
As Kenny Rogers’ star continued to explode, Hollywood came calling. Rogers scored the lead role in 1982’s Six Pack, a comedy about a race car driver who teams up with a bunch of ragtag orphans to defeat a corrupt county sheriff in small town Texas. (Think of it kind of like the Bad News Bears meets NASCAR.) If you grew up in the 1980s and were fortunate enough to have a subscription to HBO, you undoubtedly saw this movie 8 billion times, thanks to its constant airings in the pay TV channel’s early years. The movie is not officially available to stream anywhere, but we managed to find the movie in full on YouTube.
'We Are The World: The Story Behind The Song'
In the early ’80s, Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie struck up a friendship. Richie wrote and produced “Lady,” an eventual #1 song for Rogers (and the #47 song of ALL-TIME on the Billboard charts). Their friendship and musical partnership grew and evolved, and Rogers and Richie were there together on that memorable night in 1985 when the titans of the music industry gathered to record “We Are The World,” a charity song to benefit famine relief in Africa. Both Richie and Rogers are featured soloists on the song —pre-chorus, natch!— and the hour-long documentary We Are The World: The Story Behind The Song remains a fascinating time-capsule of this once-in-a-lifetime moment.
'The Big Lebowski'
Although Rogers was best known for this country crossover hits of the late 1970s and early 1980s, he actually scored his first Top 5 Billboard hit in 1968 with his cover of “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” Joel and Ethan Coen chose to use this psychedelic, counterculture paean to the wonders of LSD to score the hilarious “Gutterballs” dream sequence in The Big Lebowski, which made Kenny Rogers “cool” to a whole new generation of stoners and nihilists.
'Seinfeld'
By the time the late 1990s had rolled around, Kenny Rogers’ pop culture star had faded but his prominence in American culture had not. Rogers was the frontman of a chain of fast casual chicken restaurants called Kenny Rogers Roasters, a franchise whose ubiquity was such that it served as the inspiration for a memorable episode of Seinfeld. In “The Chicken Roaster” (Season 8, Episode 8), a Roasters restaurant opens up across the street from Jerry’s apartment building, leading to some typically madcap results (like Kramer becoming dangerously addicted to chicken).
