Monday, March 23, 2020

A01031 - Kenny Rogers, Country and Pop Music Star

Kenny Rogers obituary

One of the great American country singers who had hits with The Gambler, Lucille and Islands in the Stream

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Kenny Rogers performing in 1990. Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns

Kenny Rogers, who has died aged 81, was a prolific hit-maker from the late 1960s into the 80s, and with songs such as Lucille, The Gambler and Coward of the County helped to create a bestselling crossover of pop and country material. “I did songs that were not country but were more pop,” he said in 2016. “If the country audience doesn’t buy it, they’ll kick it out. And if they do, then it becomes country music.”

Rogers’s knack for finding a popular song – he was modest about his own writing skills and preferred to pick songs from other writers – was unerring, bringing him huge hits with Don Schlitz’s The Gambler (1978), Lionel Richie’s Lady (1980), and, with Dolly Parton, the Bee Gees’ Islands in the Stream (1983) among many others. Though his record sales waned in the late 80s, he bounced back in his last years with three successful albums, The Love of God (2011), You Can’t Make Old Friends (2013) and Once Again It’s Christmas (2015). Altogether he recorded 65 albums and sold more than 165m records.

Born in Houston, Texas, Kenny was the fourth of eight children of Lucille (nee Hester), a nursing assistant, and Edward Rogers, a carpenter, and grew up in the San Felipe Courts housing project. He attended Jefferson Davis high school, where he formed his first band, a doo-wop group called the Scholars, in which he sang and played guitar.

In 1956 he left school and within two years had scored a solo hit with That Crazy Feeling, which earned him an appearance on the TV show American Bandstand. He then played bass in the jazz trio the Bobby Doyle Three before moving to Los Angeles and joining the folk group the New Christy Minstrels.

In 1967 Rogers formed the First Edition (which also included New Christy Minstrels songwriter Mike Settle), and they proceeded to notch up seven Top 40 pop hits, including Mickey Newbury’s Just Dropped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In (1967, and later used for a memorable dream sequence in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski). Their most prominent hit was their version of Mel Tillis’s Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town, written from the viewpoint of a paralysed Vietnam veteran. Featuring the pained, sandpapery vocal delivery that would become Rogers’s trademark, in 1969 it reached No 2 in the UK and 6 on the Billboard pop chart.

Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton had huge success with their duet Islands in the Stream in 1983. Photograph: Beth Gwinn/Redferns

The First Edition also made a couple of movie appearances, and in 1971 began hosting their own TV show, Rollin’ on the River. But by 1975 the group were in commercial decline, prompting Rogers to start a solo career with the United Artists label.

In 1977 he topped the US country chart for the first time with Lucille (also a No 1 hit in the UK and several other countries), another storytelling song, which sold 5m copies worldwide. It paved the way for further Rogers classics including The Gambler (1978, another Country No 1 and a US Top 20 pop hit) and Coward of the County (1979, a UK and Country No 1, and a No 3 on the US pop chart).

Rogers’s yearning vocal tone also made him a natural ballad singer, as he demonstrated with the chart-topping Lady. Another of his talents was picking the right duet partners. He teamed up with Dottie West on a string of big country hits in the late 70s and early 80s, including three No 1s, and reached the US Top 5 with Kim Carnes on Don’t Fall in Love With a Dreamer (1980). That track came from a chart-topping concept album that Carnes and her husband, Dave Ellingson, wrote for Rogers, called Gideon, the story of cowboy Gideon Tanner.

Kenny Rogers and Jane Seymour in the TV show Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman in 1993. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/ITV

His collaboration with Sheena Easton on We’ve Got Tonight (1983) was a Country No 1 and reached No 6 on the pop chart. In the same year he achieved one of his best-loved career highlights by duetting with Parton on Islands in The Stream, an international smash. “Everybody always thought we were having an affair,” Rogers said of his great friend Parton. “We didn’t. We just teased each other and flirted with each other for 30 years.”

In 1985 he was one of the featured superstars on USA for Africa’s We Are the World. His album The Heart of the Matter of the same year, produced by George Martin, was his last to top the US Country chart, and the following year he was voted favourite singer of all time by USA Today and People magazine. He won a Grammy award for Make No Mistake, She’s Mine (1987), a duet with Ronnie Milsap that was his penultimate Country No 1 single.

But Rogers had several strings to his bow. His hit The Gambler had spawned a string of TV films in which he played the title role of Brady Hawkes. In 1991, with former Kentucky Fried Chicken chief executive John Y Brown Jr, he launched a string of chicken restaurants called Kenny Rogers Roasters. Having starred as a racing car driver in the movie Six Pack (1982), Rogers collaborated with Sprint car driver CK Spurlock to create the car manufacturer Gambler Chassis.

Kenny Rogers with his 1957 convertible Chevrolet in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, in 1990. Photograph: Paul Harris/Getty Images

A keen amateur photographer, Rogers was spurred to develop his skills further when he married his fourth wife, Marianne Gordon, a model. As well as taking portraits of her, Rogers studied with the photographers John Sexton and Yousuf Karsh. In 1986 he published Kenny Rogers’ America, featuring images taken while on tour, while Your Friends and Mine (1987) comprised portraits of superstars including Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson. Country music stars including Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette and Parton were the subjects of This Is My Country (2005).

He was also an author. The book of his touring musical play The Toy Shoppe was published in 2000, his memoir, Luck Or Something Like It, appeared in 2012, and the following year brought his novel (co-written with Mike Blakely), What Are the Chances.

Among his countless honours were three Grammys, six Country Music Association awards and eight Academy of Country Music awards, and in 2013 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Having delivered a rousing performance in the Sunday afternoon “Legends” slot at the Glastonbury festival in 2013, Rogers embarked on his farewell tour, The Gambler’s Last Deal, in 2016. On 25 October 2017, he was given an all-star send-off at Nashville’s Bridgestone arena by guests including Richie, Parton, Don Henley, Kris Kristofferson and Reba McEntire.

Kenny was wed five times. The first four marriages, to Janice (nee Gordon), Jean Rogers, Margo (nee Anderson), and Marianne, ended in divorce. He is survived by his fifth wife, Wanda (nee Miller), their twin sons, Justin and Jordan, a daughter, Carole, from his marriage to Janice, a son, Kenny Jr, from his marriage to Margo, and another son, Christopher, from his marriage to Marianne.

•Kenny (Kenneth Ray) Rogers, singer and musician, born 21 August 1938; died 20 March 2020

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

A01030 - Rosalind P. Walter, First "Rosie the Riveter" and Generous PBS Funder

Rosalind P. Walter, 95, First ‘Rosie the Riveter’ and a PBS Funder, Dies

A daughter of privilege who worked on an assembly line during World War II, she became a principal benefactor of public television, her name intoned on a host of programs.

Credit...Joseph Sinnott

By Joseph Berger

March 4, 2020

Rosalind P. Walter grew up in a wealthy and genteel Long Island home. Yet when the United States entered World War II, she chose to join millions of other women in the home-front crusade to arm the troops with munitions, warships and aircraft.

She worked the night shift driving rivets into the metal bodies of Corsair fighter planes at a plant in Connecticut — a job that had almost always been reserved for men. A newspaper column about her inspired a morale-boosting 1942 song that turned her into the legendary Rosie the Riveter, the archetype of the hard-working women in overalls and bandanna-wrapped hair who kept the military factories humming.

Written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb and popularized by the Four Vagabonds, the bandleader Kay Kyser and others, “Rosie the Riveter” captured a historical moment that helped sow the seeds of the women’s movement of the last half of the 20th century. It began:

All the day long whether rain or shine
she’s a part of the assembly line
She’s making history,
working for victory —
Rosie, brrrrr, the Riveter
Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage
Sitting up there on the fuselage
That little frail can do, more than a male can do —
Rosie, brrrrr, the Riveter.

Other women went on to become models for Rosie posters and magazine covers as well.

But Rosie was just Ms. Walter’s first celebrated act. At her death on Wednesday at 95, she remained something of a public presence as a major philanthropist and one of PBS’s principal benefactors, her name intoned with others on programming like “Great Performances,” “American Masters,” “PBS NewsHour,” “Nature” and documentaries by Ken and Ric Burns.

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She was the largest individual supporter of WNET in New York, helping to finance 67 shows or series starting in 1978.

Her friend Richard Somerset-Ward said she died at her home in Manhattan.

Ms. Walter had been drawn to public television in part to compensate for lost opportunities during the war, said Allison Fox, WNET’s senior director for major gifts. In serving her country, Ms. Walter had sacrificed a chance to attend either Smith or Vassar College, Ms. Fox said, and found that public television documentaries and other programs helped fill in the gaps in her education.

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“She cared deeply about the public being informed and felt that public television and media is the best way to accomplish this,” Ms. Fox said.

Ms. Walter had two sources of wealth. Her father, Carleton Humphreys Palmer, was president and then chairman of E.R. Squibb and Sons, the Brooklyn-based drug company that helped mass produce the early doses of penicillin distributed to the troops during World War II. (It is now a subsidiary of Bristol Myers Squibb.)

Her second husband, Henry Glendon Walter Jr., was president and later chairman and chief executive of International Flavors and Fragrances, which provides the scents and tastes for 38,000 products, from perfumes to snacks to laundry detergents; for many years it was the world’s largest company of its kind.

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Henry and Rosalind Walter gave generously to the American Museum of Natural History, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Long Island University, the college scholarship program of the United States Tennis Association and the North Shore Wildlife Sanctuary on Long Island.

Some gifts came through what is known today as the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation. The Walters served as trustees or directors of many of the organizations they gave to.

Rosalind Palmer Walter — friends called her Roz, not Rosie — was born on June 24, 1924, in Brooklyn, one of four children of Carleton and Winthrop (Bushnell) Palmer. Her mother was a professor of literature at Long Island University.

Rosalind grew up on her family’s estate in Fairfield, Conn., and her parents sent her to the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn., one of the first college preparatory boarding schools for upper-class women.

By the time she graduated, Europe was at war, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 spurred the United States to declare war on Japan, Germany and Italy, she was recruited, at 19, as an assembly line worker at the Vought Aircraft Company in Stratford, Conn., not far from Fairfield. (The family later settled in Centre Island, a village in the town of Oyster Bay on Long Island.)

Ms. Walter’s story caught the attention of the syndicated newspaper columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote about her in his “Cholly Knickerbocker” column. And that, in turn, inspired the songwriters.

A year after the war’s end, Ms. Walter, by then working as a nurse’s aide at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, married Henry S. Thompson, a lieutenant with the Naval Reserve and a graduate of Stanford University, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. They had a son, also named Henry, before the couple divorced in the 1950s.

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Her second husband, Mr. Walter, whom she married in 1956, had a son from a previous marriage, Henry G. Walter III, who died in 2012. Ms. Walter is survived by her son, Henry S. Thompson; two grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and several step-great-grandchildren.

Ms. Walter was not the only Rosie the Riveter. There were at least four other women who became models for the character as the War Production Board sought to recruit more women for the military factories.

Norman Rockwell drew his version of Rosie for the cover of the May 29, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post — a grimy-faced, muscular woman in denim overalls, work goggles perched on her forehead and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf trampled underfoot. His model was a Vermont woman, Mary Doyle Keefe, who died in 2015.

And J. Howard Miller drew a Rosie poster for Westinghouse war factories. He portrayed her in a red and white polka dot bandanna as she flexed a biceps under the words “We Can Do It!” The image became a feminist symbol starting in the 1980s, reprinted on T-shirts and coffee mugs. The model for that Rosie was most likely Naomi Parker Fraley, a California waitress who died in 2018.

So Rosalind Walter cannot alone claim the crown of being the real Rosie the Riveter. But she was there first.