Don Schlitz Wrote Most of This Massive Kenny Rogers Hit in 20 Minutes

Kenny Rogers had plenty of hit singles throughout his legendary career. But a lot of them might not have happened if not for “The Gambler”. Out in 1978,  “The Gambler” is Rogers’s fourth No. 1 single, and his first multi-platinum hit.

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Not only is it a signature song for Rogers, but it’s also Schlitz’s first cut as a songwriter. He also wrote it by himself, penning almost all of it in just 20 minutes.

At the time, Schlitz was still just dreaming of a songwriting career. He was working the graveyard shift as a computer operator when he first had the idea for “The Gambler”. 

“I wrote it in August of ’76, walking home from a meeting with my mentor, Bob McDill,” Schlitz recalls. “I walked from his office over on Music Row to my apartment, and in that 20 minutes, I wrote most of it in my head. I didn’t write a last verse. [I] had no idea what was gonna happen, thought it was an interesting story, but it was a throwaway. I spent about six weeks trying to figure out what was gonna happen after the chorus.”

The rest of the song took much longer. When he finally settled on the ending, which presumably means the song’s subject dies, it almost became the death of the song.

“I finally settled on the eight lines of the last verse, what I now call my ‘Guy de Maupassant’ ending,” he says, referring to a popular French short story writer known for not ending his stories. “And nobody would touch it.”

What Kenny Rogers Says About Don Schlitz and “The Gambler”

Schlitz wrote “The Gambler” in 1976, the same year his father passed away, which may have led to the song’s inspiration. In 1978, Bobby Bare included a version on his Bare album. But it’s Rogers’s version that became so successful, both at country and pop radio.

“The Gambler” became the inspiration for a series of made-for-TV movies starring Rogers. It gave Schlitz his first CMA Award, for Song of the Year, and his first Grammy, for Best Country Song. It also, at least according to Rogers, helped propel Schlitz’s career even more.

“He really has become one of the most prolific country songwriters, and ‘The Gambler’ was actually his first country song he’d ever written,” Rogers maintained. “And the year he won all the awards … he came up, and he had on his rock ‘n’ roll T-shirt for the Country Music Awards. And he says, ‘This is my first country song, and I find all this very encouraging.’”

After winning the CMA Award for “The Gambler”, Schlitz won two more for Song of the Year. In 1986, he won Song of the Year for “On The Other Hand” by Randy Travis. One year later, he won in the same category, this time for Travis’s “Forever And Ever, Amen”.

Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall Of Fame