The sex magic of Kenny Rogers

Remembering the silver daddy of Pop Culture

He was a paunchy, middle-aged white guy with an okay voice and a smile, and for a few years he was the biggest star in the world. Upon his death I’m flipping through decades of media coverage of his amazing career. A profile in 1980: “Kenny Rogers is a Middle American father figure. In his silver mane, glistening grey beard and wide girth, he’s a congenial Santa Claus, always ready with a smile and a supportive nod of approval.”

Rocking a dadbod and having a blast, sometimes dressing up in cowboy drag for fun, Kenny Rogers came along at a tough moment: when the Baby Boomers were starting to get old. They’d said they’d rather ‘die young than fade away’, but he helped you over the hump.

He was the silver daddy we didn’t know we needed—but really did.

Looking over his life, I realize he was contributing a lot of new ideas about how to be alive, and he had to learn them all on his own. “Like most men of his day, he was pretty shut down,” he writes of his father in his 2012 memoir, Luck or Something Like It. His father was a drunk, his mother was the strong one, too strong maybe. “I never saw her actually hit him, but she was wielding a twelve-inch skillet.”