Don Schlitz, the Country Music Hall of Fame songwriter who wrote "The Gambler" when he was twenty-three and watched it become a Kenny Rogers standard, a five-times-platinum single and a lyric quoted by politicians and card-table philosophers for forty-six years, died on Thursday at a Nashville hospital following a sudden illness. He was seventy-three. [1] Initial wires placed the death on Friday; the Grand Ole Opry and the hospital put it on Thursday evening.

Schlitz was born in Durham, North Carolina in August 1952, attended Duke briefly, and moved to Nashville in 1973 to take an all-night job at Vanderbilt's computer center. He wrote "The Gambler" in 1976 after three dead-end years. [2] He recorded it himself first; the producer Larry Butler brought it to Rogers. The Rogers version reached number one on the country chart in late 1978, crossed over to pop, and won Schlitz the Grammy for Best Country Song and the CMA Song of the Year Award in 1979. The reporter who told him about the CMA nomination, Schlitz liked to say, added that it would be the first line of his obituary. [3]

It is the first line of this one because Schlitz owned the joke. The body of work is elsewhere. He wrote "On the Other Hand," "Forever and Ever, Amen" and "Deeper Than the Holler" for Randy Travis; "When You Say Nothing at All" for Keith Whitley and then Alison Krauss; "I Feel Lucky" and "He Thinks He'll Keep Her" for Mary Chapin Carpenter; "Forty Hour Week" for Alabama. Twenty-five country number ones. Fifty top-ten singles. ASCAP Country Songwriter of the Year four consecutive years, 1988 through 1991. Inductions into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, Songwriters Hall of Fame, Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry — the only non-performer ever made an Opry member. [1]

Schlitz performed into the 2020s at the Bluebird Cafe, where he co-invented the in-the-round format now a Nashville standard. He is survived by his wife Stacey and their family.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles