Songwriting titan Don Schlitz dies at 73
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Don Schlitz at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in the Ford Theater in 2015. Photo: Rick Diamond/Getty Images
Music Row titan Don Schlitz, the prolific songwriter responsible for a raft of modern classics including "The Gambler" and "Forever and Ever, Amen," died this week in Nashville. He was 73.
The big picture: Schlitz, who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2017, turned the daily lives of ordinary people into poetry.
- Many of his songs became massive commercial hits, but they were also deeply soulful, slyly funny and emotionally devastating.
Schlitz was a shapeshifter. He could make you cry with an ethereal love song like "When You Say Nothing At All," which was co-written with recent Hall of Fame inductee Paul Overstreet and recorded by Keith Whitley and then Allison Krauss.
- Then he could team up with Mary Chapin Carpenter to pen the girl-power anthem "He Thinks He'll Keep Her" and the rollocking laugh-riot "I Feel Lucky."
- He wrote songs that drove a resurgence in twangy traditionalist country music in the 1980s. But he could also write a cross-genre juggernaut that fit in on pop radio.
Flashback: Schlitz moved to Nashville at 20 to try his hand at songwriting. He initially worked overnight shifts at Vanderbilt University as a computer operator. He'd use his late-night downtime to write songs.
- "I had access to a typewriter at Vanderbilt at the computer lab and that's where I'd write," he said in a 2018 interview with the Library of Congress.
- "I wrote lots of horrible songs there — they were well-metered and well-rhymed but horrible!"
Zoom in: He wrote "The Gambler" in 1976, when he was 23 and considering leaving Nashville behind. But when Kenny Rogers released his version in 1978, it became one of the definitive country songs of all time.
- The song is a timeless parable about how to approach life, which came to Schlitz while he was walking to his Fairfax Avenue apartment.
- Schlitz later said that was the song "that kicked the door down for me" and and set the standard for the rest of his career.
What they're saying: "Don Schlitz's place as a songwriting great would be secure had he never written 'The Gambler' or had he only written 'The Gambler,'" Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young said.
- "His curiosity about and concern for people fueled his empathetic songs, and his work ethic ensured that his gifts as a writer were fully realized."