A modest baseball song by Kenny Rogers, “The Greatest,” offers a heartwarming lesson.
Anyone who was not an all-star in Little League Baseball will have to appreciate Kenny Rogers’s ode to the hopeful optimism of childhood with “The Greatest.” Released in 1999, it is one of the more heartwarming baseball songs, turning the strikeout tale of “Casey at the Bat” on its head.
Kenny Rogers always had a talent with story songs. If you discount his talent as being too pop, just compare his version of his greatest hit “The Gambler” to the recording of the song by Johnny Cash. Both versions were released in 1978, and while I think Cash is one of the all-time greats, there is a reason that Kenny Rogers’s version of “The Gambler” is the one we remember.
Rogers never had a story song surpass “The Gambler.” Around a year after that song’s release, his revenge tale “Coward of the County” became a top-ten hit in 1979. It is a catchy tune and became a TV movie in 1981, but it has not aged as well as “The Gambler.” The Chipmunks also covered “Coward of the County,” of course not near as well as Rogers, although their version has the advantage of being more chipmunky and deleting the rape.
“The Greatest” did hit the country charts in 1999, but was not much of a hit. It did spawn a book but no movie. I’d never even heard the song until very recently. That’s probably okay, as the song seems not to be trying to hard. It presents a modest tale about a young kid, with no life-and-death events as in “The Gambler” and “Coward of the County.”
Like “The Gambler,” the song “The Greatest” was written by Don Schlitz. Schlitz also co-wrote Randy Travis’s “Forever and Ever, Amen” and Keith Whitley’s “When You Say Nothing at All” (also recorded by Alison Kraus).
Three Strikes!
“The Greatest” tells the tale of a young boy one afternoon tossing a baseball in the air and trying to hit it. Alas, he misses three times, striking himself out. Like many young children, the boy was dreaming of being “the greatest” while playing with the bat and ball We imagine his disappointment at striking out.
But a twist comes at the end. “The greatest” realizes he can still call himself “the greatest” as the greatest pitcher.
It is a sweet message about adjusting one’s perspective to see the best in ourselves. Check it out.
Kenny Rogers passed away last night in Georgia at the age of 81. Rogers song like “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).” Most tributes will begin with references to songs that we heard many times on pop-country radio through the years like “The Gambler,” “Lucille,” “Don’t Fall in Love With a Dreamer” and “Islands in the Stream.” Yet, I often forget that early in his career he recorded “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In” with The First Edition when he was more of a hippy than a silver-bearded pop singer.
You may recall the Kenny Rogers song from a dream sequence in the movie The Big Lebowski in 1998, but it first became a hit in 1967. “Just Dropped In” was written by one of Kenny Rogers’s former high school friends — Mickey Newbury, who also composed “An American Trilogy,” discussed in a previous post.
“Just Dropped In” sounds unlike “Coward of the County” and the other pop songs Rogers recorded later in his career. Even his voice sounds different. And the lyrics deviate from the literalness of most of his hits:
I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole and then I followed it in;
I watched myself crawlin’ out as I was a-crawlin’ in;
I got up so tight I couldn’t unwind;
I saw so much I broke my mind;
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.
According to some sources, “Just Dropped In” was written as a warning about using LSD. But such drug rumors surround many songs from the era.
A 2000 Billboard article “The Story So Far,” however, quotes Rogers explaining that Newbury did not intend the song to be taken completely seriously. “Mickey wrote a quasi-psychedelic song with elements of humor,” he explained. “It’s a tradition in country music to have your tongue in cheek, and that’s the case here.” (“The Story So Far,” at K-2)
One additional piece of trivia: the late great Glen Campbell played the guitar on the original recording.
Check out this psycedelic video from The Smother Brothers Hour. Kenny Rogers was always cool. RIP.
What is your favorite Kenny Rogers song? Leave your two cents in the comments.
On a tribute show in honor of Kenny Rogers, one of the members of the First Edition described how Kenny Rogers and the First Edition came to record “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” in 1969. It’s a story about how a classic recording came together through circumstances and time pressure.
“You Have 10 Minutes”
The band was in the studio and learned that they only had ten minutes left when the producer asked them if they had anything they could quickly record. The album needed one more song, so the producers just wanted a song to use as filler on the album.
Kenny Rogers replied that they knew a Mel Tillis song called “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” So the band played the song, and producers completed the recording with just a couple of takes. Rogers, who was in his early 30s, had a voice that captured an older man’s weariness at a frustrating relationship with his wife.
The completed song went on the album. And then it became a huge hit.
Themes in the Unusual Song
It is not surprising that the song became a hit because it is so unusual. The disturbing lyrics are sung by a disabled man fearful of his wife going to town for love. He pleads for her not to cheat on him while he is alive, reminding her he will be dead soon.
In addition to the sexual innuendo in the song, there is violence too, as the man’s injuries are from “that crazy Asian war.” And his begging and understanding turns to anger toward the end: “And if I could move I’d get my gun / And put her in the ground.” At the end, the wife is leaving and the singer prays for her to turn around.
In the hands of Kenny Rogers and the New Edition, there is something disturbing about the song. Outside of country music and hip-hop, you rarely hear similar dark themes in pop songs.
When listeners first heard the title of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” many of them might have sensed something familiar, recalling the 1958 Johnny Cash hit about a mother begging her son to avoid violence called “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” The new song took the violence of the Cash song and added sexual anguish, reflecting the openness of the 1960s for discussing such topics.
Although “Ruby” is a traditional country song, this recording was loved by young people too. Perhaps they connected with the young band, or perhaps they saw an anti-war sentiment underlying the tale.
Other Recordings of “Ruby”
Kenny Rogers and the First Edition were not the first to have a hit with “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Two years earlier in 1967, Johnny Darrell had a hit country recording of the song.
Darrell’s version is sad without being as disturbing as the Kenny Rogers version. The author of the song, Mel Tillis, performed the song too.
But the Nimoy version is not the oddest recording of the song. For the weirdest version, check out the one by actor Walter Brennan.
Jon Bon Jovi recorded a different song with a similar title, apparently acknowledging the “Ruby” song with his title, “Janie, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”
For another modern interpretation, check out a live performance of “Ruby” by The Killers. The band often perform the song and included it on their CD of rarities and B-sides, Sawdust.
What About the Other Side?
Finally, lost in the discussion of the song is the woman’s viewpoint. Geraldine Stevens, also known as Dodie Stevens, recorded an answer song in 1969. In her song, she takes the woman’s point of view, using the same music with the title, “Billy, I’ve Got to Go to Town.”
In the “Billy” song, Ruby tells her side of the story, explaining that her husband is still her man but bemoaning his jealousy. She does not explain why she has to go to town, though: “You’ve given all you had to give and now it’s up to me . . . Billy for God’s sake trust in me.”
Is she going to work? Prostituting herself to get money for them to live? We do not get an answer in this answer song.
All of the different versions of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” have their merits. But none of those recordings quite capture the unusual and disturbing nature of the song or reflect the turbulent era in which it was recorded in the way that Kenny Rogers and the First Edition did in those ten minutes when they rushed to fill an album.
The last few weeks have been full of speculation about the ending of the AMC TV series Breaking Bad. I will leave it to others to debate the greatness of tonight’s series finale. But one thing we cannot argue about is that it was cool that the final scene used the Badfinger song, “Baby Blue,” which first appeared on the band’s 1971 album, Straight Up.
Both the band’s name and the TV series feature the word “bad.” More importantly, though, the song’s opening had appropriate lyrics for the show’s end, as well as a good sound for the mood of the ending of the series and of our relationship with Walter White (Bryan Cranston).
Guess I got what I deserve; Kept you waiting there, too long my love, All that time, without a word; Didn’t know you’d think, that I’d forget, or I’d regret,
The special love I have for you, My baby blue
Below is a 1972 Badfinger performance of “Baby Blue.” Note that the band is introduced by a dark-haired Kenny Rogers.
Unfortunately, the original Badfinger, which lost band members Tom Evans and Pete Ham to suicide, has not been active since the mid-1980s. A lot of people, though, are singing their song tonight.
What did you think of the ending of Breaking Bad? Leave your two cents in the comments.
May 25 is the anniversary of 1986’s Hands Across America. For those of you too young to remember, Hands Across America is something that people did before we had the Internet. Americans across the United States gathered to hold hands in an attempt to create a 4,125-mile human chain from coast-to-coast through seventeen states.
They held hands for about fifteen minutes, sang the “Hands Across America” theme song (recorded by Voices of America), “America the Beautiful,” and “We Are the World,” which had been released a year earlier in 1985. And this event occurred in the days before we had hand sanitizer.
Hands Across America, Hands Across this land I love; United we fall, United we stand, Hands Across America.
Did it succeed? Well, the chain ended up with broken places in several barren areas. But millions of people across the country, including many famous celebrities, gathered that day for the event.
President Reagan held hands in Washington, connected at least theoretically, to Texas migrant farm workers who organized a 51-mile chain in Texas. And we had celebrities. The chain included Oprah, Jerry Seinfeld, Jesse Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Rev. Billy Graham, Prince, Bill Clinton, Kenny Rogers, and Shamu the killer whale. There is even a book about the day.
The event did not reach its goal to raise $50 million for the hungry, and the promotion costs were high, but it raised around $20 million for soup kitchens and shelters, while raising awareness about the issue. And it gave us something to do.
Yes, I say “us” because I participated in the event. I was on a trip traveling through Arizona on that date with a group of friends. We had not planned to be in a particular spot, but when we saw the line forming in the desert (see photo above), we all jumped out of the vehicle and joined in the festivities.
Everyone was friendly and happy for those fifteen minutes. As silly and cheesy as it was, maybe we should do it more often.
See these people over there? They are my sister and brother, When they laugh I laugh, When they cry I cry, When they need me I’ll be right there by their side.
Photo by Chimesfreedom. Were you there for Hands Across America? Leave a comment.
about the day.