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How Kenny Rogers crossed over

Kenny Rogers and the First Edition were the pop band in a hurry. Rogers co-founded the First Edition with fellow alumni of the ’60s folk revival ensemble The New Christy Minstrels. The First Edition’s early hits were pop-rock songs aimed primarily at younger listeners. Before “Ruby,” their most notable hit was the psychedelic-themed “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).”

Here is “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” from their 1969 album:

In a 2015 panel discussion, band members recounted first hearing “Ruby” on “Roger’s album” (presumably Roger Miller). Miller’s version, unlike those of Tillis, Jennings, and Darrell, includes a stretch of isolated percussion undergirding the fourth verse. The First Edition’s arrangement reprises this approach.

They recorded “Ruby” almost as an afterthought, when they had a few extra minutes left in a recording session. The song quickly became a hit upon its release in June 1969, peaking at #6 on the Billboard U.S. Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts by August of 1969. It peaked at #2 in the United Kingdom. Controversy about the song diminished its radio play, but not its success. According to band members, some radio stations refused to play it because of the violent line in the final verse, “If I could move, I’d get my gun and put her in the ground.”

The song also marked the first hit by the band under the name “Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.” The name change was a marketing decision to avoid having two competing singles out with the same band name, and to capitalize on their audience’s increasing connection with Rogers. The original band had formed with the idea that all of its members could take the lead. “Ruby,” though, would become a stratospheric hit. The name change was significant because “Ruby” would prove a pivotal step for Rogers in becoming one of the most successful crossover, or “soft shell,” country artists of the 1970s. “Ruby” launched his career in country music, but it did so in part because he had established a pop audience.

“That old crazy Asian war”

Kenny Rogers (screen cap image from YouTube)

Despite “Ruby’s” origins in a post-WWII story, and Tillis’ statement that the “crazy Asian War” he envisioned was the Korean War, the version by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition catalyzed listeners’ feelings about the Vietnam War. This link was bolstered by the song’s use in a closing montage to a report about the war on “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” a national TV news broadcast. The song played as the camera panned over an empty room. For a while after that montage, it seems, the band had to devote some energy to denying that they recorded “Ruby” for political purposes.

Rogers said in 2015 that he felt the song personalized the war for many listeners, taking them from considering it in terms of anonymous casualty statistics in the tens of thousands to feeling its impact in one vivid, heartbreaking story. While dramatizing the impotence and anguish of the returned soldier, the song also declares his bona fides of duty and patriotism–his pride in doing his “patriotic chore.” Rogers was likely right that personalizing the war’s consequences within the song connected with people in a way that a more polemical anti-war song would not.

“Ruby” became the band’s biggest hit, and a standard for them until disbanding in 1974. This performance from March 1972 is the one that hooked me on this song. By this time, the band dropped the opening percussion, leading instead with the the song’s opening interrogation: “You’ve painted up your lips, and rolled and curled your tinted hair. Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere?” Rogers’s performance is both visual and musical. He sings in a weary baritone and with a decidedly “cool” facial affect, with large tinted glasses and mostly downcast eyes. His style heightens the ambivalence in the lyrics between pitiful powerlessness and a quiet rage. Either that, or he’s stoned…

In addition to savvy use of percussion, Rogers and company arranged the vocals to emphasize the song’s themes. The rich, descending harmony singing on the name “Ruby” drops out for the final part of the line: “Don’t take your love to town,” and finally “For God’s sake, turn around.” This acoustic abandonment reinforces the weary loneliness expressed in Rogers’s voice. The First Edition’s arrangement is not as “full” as the ones that came before it, and many of the ones that came after it, and the gaps and spaces work to engage the listener.

There’s something deeply satisfying about that harmony on the word “Ruby”–great vowels and consonants, and a mix of voices yielding to that solitary plea. That one of those harmony voices was a woman’s likely enabled a broader audience to connect with it. By the time of this album, Mary Arnold had replaced her former roommate, Thelma Camacho, as the band’s female singer. Had the audition process for Camacho’s replacement gone another direction, the female harmonies on “Ruby” might have come from a young Karen Carpenter.

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