One of the most straight-forwardly country songs on this list, “If You Want To Find Love” proves Kenny Rogers’ Nashville mettle: a nostalgic, mandolin-adorned story song that actually counsels against cheating. 20: If You Want To Find Love, Back Home Again (1991) Listen to Kenny Rogers’ best songs on Apple Music or Spotify. However he preferred to describe it, his ability to sell just about any kind of pop song – to make you not just like it, but feel it – was nearly unmatched. Rogers perpetually played down his abilities as a singer, insisting that he wasn’t a technician but a stylist. “When I look at a song, I look at it as a hit, and not as a particular kind of music.” Once you know that, the wide-ranging glut of very successful songs Rogers produced, and the millions of copies they sold, makes even more sense. “I’ve always been country, but not strictly,” Rogers said in 1978. “The Gambler” and “Lady” were released within two years of each other, but Rogers never saw his aesthetic omnivorousness as a liability. His journey through commercial jazz with the New Christy Minstrels and quasi-hippiedom with the folk/rock/pop of the First Edition is wild in the context of his later hits, until you think about how diverse those hits are. A half-century later, he was best known as either The Gambler, or a crowd-pleasing pop singer-turned-fried chicken magnate. He started his career playing bass in jazz and R&B bands in his native Houston his first single, 1958’s “That Crazy Feeling,” was a convincing enough doo-wop performance to earn young Kenneth an appearance on American Bandstand. Yes, he’s a Country Music Hall of Famer yes, one of his best-known and most enduring songs is a trippy ode to LSD. Over the more than 60 years that Kenny Rogers wrote songs, his trajectory defied any straightforward narrative.