B-side "Momma's Waiting" Format Vinyl Length 3:34 | Released November 15, 1978 Genre Country Label United Artists | |
"The Gambler" is a song written by Don Schlitz, recorded by several artists, most famously by American country music singer Kenny Rogers.
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Don Schlitz wrote this song in August, 1976 when he was 23 years old. It took two years of shopping the song around Nashville before Bobby Bare recorded it on his album "Bare" at the urging of Shel Silverstein. Bare's version didn't catch on and was never released as a single, so Schlitz recorded it himself, but this version failed to chart higher than #65. However, other musicians took notice and recorded the song in 1978, including Johnny Cash, who put it on his album Gone Girl. However, it was Kenny Rogers who finally broke the song loose, in a version produced by Larry Butler. His version was a #1 Country hit and even made its way to the Pop charts at a time when Country songs rarely crossed over. It was released in November 1978 as the title track from his album The Gambler which won him the Grammy award for best male country vocal performance in 1980. In 2006 Don Schlitz appeared in the Kenny Rogers career retrospective documentary "The Journey", where he praised both Rogers' and Butler's contributions to the song stating "they added several ideas that were not mine, including the new guitar intro".
It was one of five consecutive songs by Rogers to hit #1 on the Billboard country music charts. On the pop chart, the song made it #16 and #3 on the Easy Listening chart. It's become one of Rogers's most enduring hits and a signature song. As of November 13, 2013, the digital sales of the single stood at 798,000 copies.
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The song itself tells the story of a late-night meeting on a train "bound for nowhere" between the narrator and a man known only as the gambler. The gambler tells the narrator that he can tell he is down on his luck ("out of aces") by the look in his eyes and offers him advice in exchange for his last swallow of whisky. After the gambler takes the drink (and a cigarette), he gives the following advice:
The gambler then mentions that the "secret to survivin' is knowing what to throw away, and knowing what to keep" and that "the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep". At this point, the gambler puts out the cigarette and goes to sleep.
At the end of the song we are told that "somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even", and that the narrator finds "an ace that I could keep", in his final words. Rogers' rendition in an appearance on The Muppet Show indicates the gambler actually dies in his sleep when he "broke even", thus really making those his "final words" ever spoken.