He’s a native of Houston, Texas.
Born Kenneth Ray Rogers on August 21, 1938, the country singer is the fourth among eight children to a nurse’s assistant mother and a carpenter father.
He once played double bass in a jazz group.
When Kenny Rogers started playing nightclubs in Houston in the 1950s and 1960s, he joined a jazz group – called the Bobby Doyle Three – where he had to learn how to play bass. He worked for the band for ten years, where they worked for three different clubs every day. Rogers said they were highly successful and that he was making a lot of money when he was only nineteen.
He played a crucial role in forming the American rock band Eagles.
In the late sixties, Rogers took the band’s founding member Don Henley from small-town Texas under his wing. Soon enough, Rogers helped the act sign a record label and even produced its first album. “Kenny was a generous and caring man, a wise mentor to so many of us,” Henley said.
He loved to play tennis.
For a time in the late 1970s, Rogers was so obsessed with tennis that he would play the sport eight hours a day – and against some of the world’s best players. In fact, he had tennis professionals travel with him on the road and even developed a national ranking.
