Huge Star Divides Time Between Holding, Folding, Walking THEN Running The Heck Away.

I think if you're of the age demographic our wonderful station is trying to hit, more likely than not you have the lyrics to this song inscribed deep in your brain, with a firm grip of your "singing along" synapses, all quite beyond your control. Thanks, Kenny!

Listen, music goes through two phases. One is a kind of musical flailing, as record companies desperately look for a new musical style bandwagon to jump on and run into the ground. The second is the aformentioned running the wagon down to the splinters. That's where country music was in the late seventies. Every act was forty. Every song was jam packed with thick walls of syrupy strings. It was musical polyester that had seriously lost it's twangy soul. But the "countrypolitian" sound needed to crossover. Yes, a giant pop crossover. That'll sell those records. Oh my. And that's where our boy Kenny Rogers sauntered in. With this song. Which was a %$#@ monster. My parents, who never EVER bought records, sprang for the single. Ohmigawd this song was wallpaper in our lives for months.

It was November 1978.  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 #16, though it felt like a number one, it was so prevalent. And it also inspired a series of t.v. movies that stretched into something like fifteen films of gradually more and more sleepy folding, holding and very very slow walking away.

Hey, if we're playing the Bellamy Brothers on our station. I think we can get away with making this your-

-K-101.7 SONG OF THE DAY!

And while you are here, check out this thing we did. It's fun!