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Kenny To Appear at Songwriters Hall of Fame Gala in NYC Tonight To Honor Inductee Don Schlitz
Kenny will be joining the likes of Dave Grohl, Stevie Nicks, Emmylou Harris, and other musicians helping immortalize the latest class of inductees
to the Songwriters Hall of Fame at a ceremony in New York this evening.
Kenny will announce the induction of award-winning tunesmith, Don
Schlitz, friend and writer of “The Gambler.” Kenny will sing his
signature hit as part of the induction ceremony. Other songwriters
being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year include
Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Seger, Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, and Jim
Steinman. The Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented
to Bette Midler.
Jukebox heroes
Six melody makers will be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame next week. Here’s a look behind their songs
Behind every great song is a great songwriter. With many hits,
however, the song is much better-known than the songwriter. For example,
who is Don Schlitz? He wrote Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a 1978 hit
that’s had lasting power.
Other times, you might have a familiar voice, such as Ben E. King’s, singing his own work, as he did on “Stand By Me.”
Both
writers, and several more, will be honored June 14 by the Songwriters
Hall of Fame, in a ceremony at the Marriott Marquis in Midtown. For the
occasion, we asked some of the songwriters to tell us about one of their
songs. Not only do they have stories to tell in their songs, but
stories about what went on behind the music, as well. Here are their
tales.
Don Schlitz
“The Gambler” sung by Kenny Rogers in 1978
Just
23 when he wrote it, Schlitz had moved to Nashville from Durham, NC, to
become a songwriter after dropping out of Duke. He worked as a computer
operator at Vanderbilt University and wrote in his spare time. “One hot
August afternoon in 1976, I was walking to my efficiency apartment,
carrying my heavy Gibson LG1 guitar, and I wrote virtually all of it in
my head,” Schlitz says. “The walk was about 20 minutes; I got home and
typed it all out on my Smith Corona.”
The song would go to No. 1 on the Billboard country chart.
While
Schlitz played a little “nickel and dime poker” as a teenager, he says
he never gambles now. “First off, do you want to sit down at a poker
table and get your song quoted to you? And I’m very bad at it,” he says.
(Those lyrics are “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to
fold ’em.”) A couple of years later, Rogers recorded the track. “He
moved the chorus up one verse and upped the tempo. “What he did with the
song really kicked open the door [to a songwriting career] for me.”
Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt
“Try To Remember” from “The Fantasticks,” which opened in 1960
In
1959, lyricist Tom Jones, who’s “not that Tom Jones,” was sharing an
UWS apartment with composer Schmidt. They had been working on a musical
called “Joy Comes to Deadhorse,” which became “The Fantasticks.”
Schmidt
was renting a studio in the Steinway building on 57th Street so he
could use the baby-grand pianos. “I was pretending to be Leonard
Bernstein,” says Schmidt. But the music didn’t sound like him. “I
decided to play something cool and simple, and what became ‘Try To
Remember’ just came out. I had nothing to do with it.” He played it for
Jones, who wanted to use it in the show.
“I had a cousin in the
Coast Guard stationed on Staten Island. He and his wife would invite me
out, so I wrote a good deal of the lyrics on the ferry.”