The Gambler

Don Schlitz wrote "The Gambler" in August 1976, when he was 23 years old and his father had recently died. He later told Casey Kasem on American Top 40 that "something more than me wrote that song," saying it had filtered through him and that months later he came to believe it was inspired by, and possibly a gift from, his father. The final verse arrived six weeks after the rest.

The song struggled to find a home. Schlitz shopped it around Nashville for two years before Bobby Bare recorded it for his album Bare at the urging of Shel Silverstein, but that version was never released as a single. Schlitz then recorded it himself, and it stalled at No. 65. Johnny Cash was among the other musicians who picked it up in 1978, placing it on his album Gone Girl.

Kenny Rogers cut the song at the Jack Clement Recording Studio in Nashville with producer Larry Butler, and it was released in November 1978 as the title track of his album The Gambler. Backed by musicians including Pete Drake on pedal steel guitar and Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano, it became a No. 1 country hit and crossed over to the pop charts at a time when country songs rarely did, winning Rogers the Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1980. The lyrics follow a narrator who meets a gambler on a train one summer evening; the gambler trades life advice, framed in poker metaphors, for a drink of whisky, then dies in his sleep that night.