Songoftheday 7/6/12 - But sooner or later that gentle persuader is gonna catch up to your heart...

Kenny Rogers - "Love Will Turn You Around"

from the album Love Will Turn You Around (1982)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #13 (five weeks)

Weeks in the top-40: 10

Today's Song of the Day is by bearded country/soft-rock legend Kenny Rogers, who started out as a session musician, and in 1966 joined the seminal folk group the New Christy Minstrels (a few other famous ex-"Minstrels" were the Byrds' Gene Clark, Barry McGuire, and future Rogers duet partner Kim Carnes). He only stayed a year, and defected with a few other "Minstrels" to form the hippie-rock group the First Edition. That year, they scored a top-5 hit with "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)". In '69 the group, now with Rogers' name in their moniker, scored again by veering country with a version of Mel Tillis' "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town", a top-10 pop hit. The band would plod on until 1974, when Rogers left for a solo career.

In 1975, Rogers released his debut solo album, of which the title song gave him his first solo hit, a version of the gospel standard "Love Lifted Me", which was a top-20 country single and scraped the bottom of the pop chart at #97. He gained steam with his sophomore self-titled effort, which produced a top-5 pop/#1 country hit with "Lucille", which even topped the charts in the United Kingdom.

And in gradually progressing from country to adult contemporary, Rogers' success kept growing, giving him nine #1 country hits from 1975-80, including the pop smash "Lady", written by then-Commodore Lionel Richie. Also, between 1980 to the beginning of '82 Rogers scored five adult-contemporary #1s, cementing his position as the go-to middle-aged crooner.

In 1980, his first big acting stint came from a spinoff TV-movie of one of his signature songs, The Gambler. Two years after that in 1982, Rogers made the big screen as the star of Six Pack, playing a race car driver who comes together with a group of (orphaned) kids a la Bad News Bears, but lighter. It also featured a very younger Anthony Michael Hall (of Sixteen Candles/Breakfast Club). The theme song for the movie, "Love Will Turn You Around", was released that summer as the first single from Rogers' same-titled album.

The song would be Rogers' tenth solo #1 country single and sixth adult-contemporary single, and just missed the pop top-10, spending five weeks at #13. The accompanying album, while not as popular as his last few, still managed to go platinum (selling over a million copies). And though the followup single, "A Love Song", didn't make the top-40 (it's on track on being a future "robbed hit"), Kenny would return to the top-10 the next year with his version of Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight" with Sheena Easton.

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In 2008, veteran country singer Henson Cargill ("Skip A Rope") recorded a cover of the track..

Fun Fact: Six Pack was turned into a trainwreck of a television show featuring Don Johnson, Markie Post, and a young Joaquin Phoenix as one of the kids.

Up tomorrow: A group of Sisters celebrate the 4th a little late...