OldiesSong

Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In the early 1950s, while attending Jefferson Davis High School in Houston, a teenage Kenny Rogers spent his afternoons sweeping floors at a downtown hat shop for nine dollars a week and clearing dirty dishes at the historic Rice Hotel. Instead of hanging out with classmates after the final bell, he walked or rode the bus from his family’s apartment in the San Felipe Courts public housing project into the busy downtown district to work until late at night. Out of that nine-dollar weekly pay from the hat shop, he handed a portion to his mother, Lucille, to help feed the household of eight children, and tucked the remaining change into a small box to save for an instrument. At the Rice Hotel, wearing a busboy uniform at the bottom of the staff ladder, he carried heavy trays of leftover plates and wiped down tables for wealthy businessmen and well-dressed socialites. Watching those guests over opulent dinners stood in sharp contrast to the sparse meals waiting at home, yet the job gave him a quiet front-row look at how successful people dressed, spoke, and carried themselves. He resolved that one day he would walk through those same doors as a respected guest. After months of scrubbing floors and clearing tables, he took his saved change to a local pawn shop and bought his first guitar. Late at night, while the rest of his family slept, he pressed his sore, calloused fingers against the strings until he learned the chords. By 1956, that pawn-shop guitar and work ethic led him to form his first band, The Scholars. Decades later, when he was headlining America’s largest venues and staying in five-star presidential suites, Rogers still made a point of leaving generous tips and thanking the busboys clearing the tables, never forgetting the uniform he wore at the Rice Hotel.

Please scroll down for the video. It is at the end of the article!

In February 1956, seventeen-year-old Kenny Rogers walked into a local Houston studio with his high school doo-wop group, the Scholars, to cut his first commercial single on a guitar paid for with busboy wages.

Before he ever stood behind a studio microphone, Rogers spent his afternoons after the final bell at Jefferson Davis High School riding the bus from his family’s apartment in the San Felipe Courts public housing project into downtown Houston. There, he swept floors at a hat shop for nine dollars a week and worked late shifts clearing dirty plates at the historic Rice Hotel.

Inside the Rice Hotel dining room, wearing a busboy uniform at the bottom of the staff ladder, he carried heavy trays of leftover dishes and wiped down tables for wealthy Texas oilmen and well-dressed socialites. Back home in the Fourth Ward, his mother, Lucille, stretched every dollar to feed eight children while his father, Edward Floyd Rogers, struggled with alcoholism. Kenny handed part of his weekly pay to his mother and tucked the remaining coins into a small box until he had enough to visit a downtown pawn shop and buy a secondhand guitar.

Late at night inside the cramped apartment, while his brothers and sisters slept, he pressed his sore fingers against the fretboard until calluses formed and he could play clean chords. By early 1956, that pawn-shop guitar earned him a spot alongside classmates Al Eisman, Bruce Mosier, and John Kirby in a four-part harmony group they called the Scholars.

Kenny’s older brother, Lelan Rogers, stepped in to manage the teenagers and used his connections as a local record promoter to get the band into the studio for Houston’s Cue label. Their debut 1956 single, “The Poor Little Doggie,” backed with “What Did I Do Wrong,” picked up enough regional radio airplay to get picked up for national distribution by Dot Records, followed swiftly by “Spin the Wheel.”

By 1957, Imperial Records offered the Houston teenagers a recording session in California. With Kenny’s upright bass strapped to the roof of their car for the long drive west, the Scholars traveled to Los Angeles and recorded four sides, including “Beloved” and “Kan-Gu-Wa,” giving the former Rice Hotel busboy his first taste of a professional West Coast studio.

When the Scholars disbanded later that year as members headed to college, Rogers teamed up again with his brother Lelan on the independent Kix and Carlton labels. Under the name Kenneth Rogers, he released the 1958 single “That Crazy Feeling,” which sold heavily across Texas and earned the nineteen-year-old a national television appearance on Dick Clark’s *American Bandstand*.

When follow-up singles failed to chart and the early rush of teen idol momentum faded, Rogers briefly attended the University of Houston before taking a job playing stand-up bass and singing with the Bobby Doyle Three, a disciplined Houston jazz trio that worked club lounges six nights a week. That steady nightclub grind kept him working through the early 1960s, leading to stints with the Kirby Stone Four and the New Christy Minstrels before he formed the First Edition in 1967.

Over the next decade, Rogers rode hits like “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” with the First Edition before launching his solo country run in the late 1970s with “Lucille” and “The Gambler.” Within a few years, the teenager who once cleared hotel tables for pocket change was headlining sold-out arenas and checking into the presidential suites of five-star hotels across the country.

Even at the peak of his touring fortune in the 1980s and 1990s, restaurant workers and hotel staff noticed how the singer acted whenever a meal ended. Before walking out of a dining room, Rogers routinely sought out the young busboys clearing the tables, thanked them directly for their work, and left generous cash tips beside the plates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hx4gdlfamo

Related Post

In May 1964, on her very first day in Nashville after graduating from high school in Sevier County, 18-year-old Dolly Parton walked out of the Wishy Washy Laundromat and met 21-year-old Carl Thomas Dean when he pulled his white Chevrolet pickup truck to the curb. Parton had arrived on a bus from the Smoky Mountains carrying tattered cardboard suitcases stuffed with dirty clothes and barely enough spare change to eat, getting by on cold canned food and hot water mixed with free ketchup packets. While her laundry spun inside the South Nashville shop, she stepped onto the sidewalk, where passing men had been whistling at her. Dean drove by, pulled over, and warned her casually that she was going to get sunburned out there. Running his own asphalt-paving business, he looked straight into her eyes rather than staring at her figure, listening earnestly as she talked about her mountain family. Dean later admitted his first thought upon seeing her was that he was going to marry that girl. Cautious on her first day in the city, Parton turned down his initial invitation for a date. Undeterred, Dean arranged to visit the home of her uncle and aunt, songwriter Bill Owens, the following week and spent hours on the floor playing with their three-year-old son until he won her trust. On their first official date, he drove her straight to his parents’ Nashville house to introduce her to his mother. Two years later, Monument Records president Fred Foster urged Parton to delay marriage to protect her image as a rising young singer. Instead, on May 30, 1966, Parton and Dean drove across the state line to Ringgold, Georgia, and married in a small church with only her mother, the preacher, and the preacher’s wife as witnesses. Later that year, after attending a single BMI awards dinner in a rented tuxedo, Dean loosened his bow tie in the parking lot, wished her all the success in the world, and asked never to go to another industry event again. Parton kept that promise for nearly six decades, returning home from global tours to a husband in denim overalls who renewed their vows with her for their 50th anniversary in 2016.

In late August 1991, Kenny Rogers had to cancel a private Nashville dinner with Dottie West because of a sudden scheduling conflict, never knowing it would be his last chance to sit down with his closest friend. Their partnership had begun by accident in 1978 when a delayed flight made Rogers hours late to producer Larry Butler’s Nashville studio, overlapping with West’s recording session. Recording together that night launched a run of chart-topping duets including “Every Time Two Fools Collide,” “Anyone Who Isn’t Me Tonight,” “All I Ever Need Is You,” and “What Are We Doin’ in Love,” along with CMA Vocal Duo of the Year awards in 1978 and 1979. By 1991, however, West was facing severe bankruptcy, owing the IRS more than $1.3 million and watching her mansion, stage gowns, and career awards go to public auction. Rogers had arranged the August dinner to comfort her and help her find a way forward. Days after the canceled meal, on the night of August 30, 1991, West’s car broke down on her way to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. Determined not to be late for the audience waiting for her, she asked her 81-year-old neighbor, George Thackston, to drive her. Exiting Briley Parkway at over 55 miles per hour, the car went airborne and struck the concrete median. Conscious in the wreckage, West urged paramedics to treat her elderly neighbor first, unaware that her own liver and spleen were critically ruptured. Rogers flew straight to Vanderbilt University Medical Center and stood beside her intensive care bed. While doctors told him that the comatose singer could no longer hear or process sound, Rogers held her hand and leaned in to whisper his gratitude, love, and apologies anyway, convinced her spirit was still in the room listening. After West passed away during her third surgery at 9:43 a.m. on September 4, 1991, at age 58, Rogers sang at her Nashville funeral, supported her daughter Shelly West, and appeared in the 1995 biographical film Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story to honor the friend he wished he had met for one more dinner.

After selling tens of millions of records in the 1990s, Alan Jackson offered to buy his parents a spacious new house in Georgia, only for Eugene and Ruth Jackson to refuse to leave the home built around an old twelve-by-twelve-foot tool shed. Early in their marriage, Eugene and Ruth had moved into that small shed on College Street in Newnan, Georgia, on land left by Ruth’s father. As four daughters and one son arrived, Eugene came home each evening from his job as a post office mechanic with engine grease stained into his hands and nailed up extra rooms around the original frame. Space remained so tight that young Alan slept on a bed tucked into the narrow hallway leading toward the back laundry room. When Nashville success made Jackson a multimillionaire, he wanted his parents to have a comfortable estate. Neither Eugene nor Ruth wanted to part with the boards Eugene had measured and sawed himself while raising five children. Respecting their pride, Jackson found other ways to give back: at Christmas in 1992, he quietly paid off their remaining mortgage and handed them the deed, and the following Christmas, he and his wife, Denise, surprised Eugene with a white 1955 Ford Thunderbird like the one he had sold years earlier to feed the family. Even after Eugene passed away in January 2000 at age 72, Ruth turned down her children’s requests to move closer to them. When fans drove down College Street hoping to see where the country star grew up, she often stepped onto the front porch and invited strangers inside for iced tea. Ruth remained in that modest house for another seventeen years until she passed away at home on January 7, 2017, at age 86. Whenever Jackson returned from his Tennessee estates to visit, the six-foot-four singer still ducked through the low doorway his father had built and sat at the small kitchen table where his life began.

On June 7, 1991, an 87-year-old Roy Acuff and Randy Travis stood on the Grand Ole Opry stage to welcome Alan Jackson into the institution he had revered since leaving Newnan, Georgia. Six years earlier, Jackson had been driving a forklift at a Kmart warehouse and fixing cars in his hometown. After his wife, Denise, a flight attendant, met Glen Campbell at the Atlanta airport and asked for advice, the couple sold their belongings in 1985 and moved to Nashville. Jackson sorted mail in the TNN television basement and wrote songs in the dark, carrying the quiet fear that he might fail and have to return home. Everything shifted after the release of his 1990 debut album, Here in the Real World. On March 2, 1990, veteran performer Jimmy C. Newman introduced Jackson for his first performance at the Grand Ole Opry. Stepping onto the six-foot circle of oak cut from the old Ryman Auditorium floor, Jackson felt overwhelmed knowing his heroes George Jones and Hank Williams had stood on those same boards. When he returned to that circle for his official induction fifteen months later, his debut album had already gone platinum. Jackson remained quiet and deferential, pulling the brim of his white cowboy hat low as Acuff, then in the final seventeen months of his life, stood beside Travis to pass the torch across three generations of traditional country music. Denise and Jackson’s parents traveled from Georgia to watch from the wings. Having grown up listening to the Saturday night radio broadcast, his family valued Opry membership above any commercial trophy. For more than three decades afterward, Jackson kept the promise of that June night, defending the traditional sound of fiddle and pedal steel first entrusted to him inside that wooden circle.

On October 6, 1974, during the National 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Marty Robbins drove his purple-and-gold No. 42 Dodge Charger straight into a concrete wall at over 145 miles per hour rather than hit fellow driver Richard Childress. By 1974, Robbins was already a Grammy-winning country music star with dozens of chart-topping songs and a regular spot at the Grand Ole Opry. He did not race for prize money or corporate sponsorships, paying tens of thousands of dollars out of his own music earnings for cars, Cotton Owens crew mechanics, and repairs just to compete on weekends. Because of his fame, some inside professional racing still viewed him as a wealthy singer chasing thrills. Coming through Turn 4 at Charlotte in North Carolina, Childress lost control of his No. 96 car and spun across the track directly in front of Robbins, exposing his driver-side door. With no room to pass and knowing a direct broadside impact at 145 miles per hour would likely kill the young driver, Robbins yanked his steering wheel hard to the right and took the full force of the concrete wall himself. The crash crushed the front of the No. 42 car and sent Robbins to Charlotte Memorial Hospital with cracked ribs, a bruised sternum, a broken tailbone, and a deep facial laceration between his eyes requiring 32 stitches. When he woke up bandaged and battered, he joked to doctors and reporters that the wreck might have made him look handsomer. Childress publicly credited Robbins with saving his life and went on to build Richard Childress Racing, winning six NASCAR Cup Series championships with Dale Earnhardt. Robbins kept racing until November 1982, one month before his passing at age 57, leaving the purple-and-gold No. 42 remembered by NASCAR drivers as the car of a true brother.

In 1973, a fifteen-year-old Alan Jackson used money saved from shining shoes since age twelve and a small credit union loan from his father to buy a beat-up 1955 Ford Thunderbird convertible in Newnan, Georgia, a full year before he was old enough to get a driver’s license. Growing up with four sisters in a small house built around his grandfather’s old tool shed, Alan spent the next eighteen months working under the carport alongside his father, Ford mechanic Joseph Eugene “Daddy Gene” Jackson. A quiet man who worked with his hands to support the family, Daddy Gene spent hundreds of hours with his son tearing down the engine, shaping sheet metal, welding panels, and painting the body until the red-and-white Thunderbird was ready for Alan’s sixteenth birthday in October 1974. That convertible became the car Alan drove to pick up his high school sweetheart, Denise, for dates at the local Dairy Queen. After the couple married in 1979 and needed money to pay their early bills, Alan reluctantly sold the car he called his first love, letting go of the machine he and his father had rebuilt piece by piece. By Christmas 1993, after Alan’s music career had taken off in Nashville, Denise secretly hired someone to track down the convertible across state lines using its original vehicle identification number and parked it in the driveway as a holiday surprise. When Alan looked underneath the body, he knew immediately it was his boyhood car because he could still see the exact hand welds and metal repairs his father had made twenty years earlier. After Daddy Gene died at age seventy-two in 2000, those welds remained as a physical trace of his father’s hands. Even after building a large collection of classic automobiles in Nashville, Jackson kept that 1955 Thunderbird at the center of his garage and featured it on album artwork and music videos.

On October 6, 1974, during the National 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Marty Robbins drove his purple-and-gold No. 42 Dodge Charger straight into a concrete wall at over 145 miles per hour rather than hit fellow driver Richard Childress. By 1974, Robbins was already a Grammy-winning country music star with dozens of chart-topping songs and a regular spot at the Grand Ole Opry. He did not race for prize money or corporate sponsorships, paying tens of thousands of dollars out of his own music earnings for cars, Cotton Owens crew mechanics, and repairs just to compete on weekends. Because of his fame, some inside professional racing still viewed him as a wealthy singer chasing thrills. Coming through Turn 4 at Charlotte in North Carolina, Childress lost control of his No. 96 car and spun across the track directly in front of Robbins, exposing his driver-side door. With no room to pass and knowing a direct broadside impact at 145 miles per hour would likely kill the young driver, Robbins yanked his steering wheel hard to the right and took the full force of the concrete wall himself. The crash crushed the front of the No. 42 car and sent Robbins to Charlotte Memorial Hospital with cracked ribs, a bruised sternum, a broken tailbone, and a deep facial laceration between his eyes requiring 32 stitches. When he woke up bandaged and battered, he joked to doctors and reporters that the wreck might have made him look handsomer. Childress publicly credited Robbins with saving his life and went on to build Richard Childress Racing, winning six NASCAR Cup Series championships with Dale Earnhardt. Robbins kept racing until November 1982, one month before his passing at age 57, leaving the purple-and-gold No. 42 remembered by NASCAR drivers as the car of a true brother.

In the days before his mother’s funeral in January 2017, Alan Jackson wrote and recorded “Where Her Heart Has Always Been” so it could be played at her service in Newnan, Georgia. Ruth Musick Jackson, known to the family as Mama Ruth, had raised Alan and his four sisters with her husband Eugene in a small Newnan home built directly around his grandfather’s old tool shed. The house was so tight that young Alan slept in a hallway, yet inside those walls she passed down a steady Christian faith and a love for church hymns, later encouraging him to record his 2006 gospel collection Precious Memories as a Christmas gift for her. Even after her son became a country superstar, she remained rooted in her Georgia hometown until the morning of January 7, 2017, when she passed away at age 86. Since Eugene’s passing in 2000 after 48 years of marriage, a loss Jackson had honored in “Drive (For Daddy Gene),” Mama Ruth had lived 17 quiet years missing her husband. Working through his own grief before the burial, Jackson shaped a gentle acoustic guitar and fiddle arrangement Inspired by that calm winter morning, finding comfort in the belief that she was finally reunited with Daddy Gene. Years later, as Jackson prepared to include a studio version on his May 2021 album Where Have You Gone, one of his sisters found an old phone recording from their mother’s final years. In the clip, an elderly Mama Ruth slowly reads from the Book of John in a weathered Southern voice. Rather than polishing the audio, Jackson placed all 25 seconds of her raspy, halting scripture reading directly at the opening of the track, letting the mother who first taught him gospel hymns lead into his farewell song.

In 1985, Eastern Airlines flight attendant Denise Jackson spotted Glen Campbell at the Atlanta airport and walked over to ask how her twenty-six-year-old husband could get a break in country music. Since marrying his high school sweetheart in 1979, Alan Jackson had spent six years in Newnan, Georgia, driving a Kmart warehouse forklift, doing carpentry, and selling shoes and used cars by day. At night, he practiced guitar in the basement and sang in small local bars while Denise listened to every new song he wrote. Although Denise never approached famous passengers on the job, she introduced herself to Campbell that day and told him about her husband. Campbell listened, handed her the business card of Marty Gamblin, who ran his Nashville publishing company, Seventh Son Music, and told her to have Alan send a demo tape. After Gamblin heard the tape and invited them to town, the couple packed up their home in Newnan and moved to Nashville in June 1985 with no other industry connections. While Denise kept flying to pay the bills, Gamblin helped Alan get a job sorting mail in the basement of The Nashville Network, where he worked for nine months watching established country artists walk the halls. Following Gamblin’s advice to focus on songwriting before chasing a record deal, Alan signed his first publishing contract with Seventh Son Music in 1986 for $125 a week, building the catalog that led to his Arista Records debut in 1989. Decades later, when he entered the Country Music Hall of Fame, Jackson still credited his entire career to that Atlanta airport terminal and the wife who spoke up for him before anyone knew his name.