a streaking meteor

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     That Kenny Rogers song I mentioned Friday seemed like such a departure for Kenny Rogers.  "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)".




     Well, it was not actually a "departure" for him because that song came first, in the 1960s with his band The First Edition -- more than a decade before his popularity grew to star proportions as a country singer in the 1980s.

     But to me it was -- well -- it was confusing.


     FIRST:  I heard "Just Dropped In" someplace, sometime, I don't know where, and it was in my head.  I did not know who recorded it.

     SECOND:  I heard Kenny Rogers sing "Lucille" on TV (1977) and I remembered the song and the name because he was so good.

     THIRD:  I got a job in radio in the 1980s -- it was a country station, so I played a lot of Kenny Rogers for the people.  So to me, as far as I knew, he was strictly a Country and Western singer.

     FOURTH:  Someone at the radio station told me "Just Dropped In" was by Kenny Rogers, and I was like -- "Kenny Rogers sang that?  Really??"  Because Just Dropped In was -- psychedelic rock, which many bands were doing for a brief time in the late '60s -- Beatles, Stones, Eric Clapton and Cream, Kenny Rogers...(Wait.  What??)

     Right?  So then I had a little window into the world, and the past, looking at the idea that a country artist used to do rock.



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The songs we listened to last week cover a huge world, musically, as well as time-line-wise -- 1967 - 2015, 48 years! ...

~  "Lucille" -- straight up, down-right Country, from the 1970s

~  "Children Go Where I Send Thee" with the singing group "Home Free" -- this song is a traditional African-American spiritual, so -- old.  The Rogers-Home Free recording came out in 2015.  Recent.  (Time-jumble.)

~  "Islands In The Stream" -- Written by the Bee Gees, this song was named after a novel by Ernest Hemingway.  Rogers recorded it with Dolly Parton:  became a hit in 1983.  (Ernest Hemingway?



  The Bee Gees?  



Is it any wonder I get confused...??)


     Wikipedia calls this song "soft rock" -- but since I played it on a country station, I think of it as Mellow-country.

~  and "Just Dropped In" -- 1967 -- "Psychedelic rock," baby!

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     When I played "Just Dropped In" from You Tube (a live version, I think, from a TV performance) -- one of the Comments under it, written about a week before Rogers' passing, said:

"This man has been a streaking meteor his whole life."


     That observation got me thinking about --

~ the broad range of time covered by Kenny Rogers recordings, and
~ the range of  musical and lyrical styles reflected in his body of work.




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"This man has been a streaking meteor his whole life."

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