Don Schlitz, who has died of an aneurysm aged 73, was a songwriter who had a huge global hit with Kenny Rogers’s version of The Gambler, one of the biggest sellers in country music history; in the UK alone it went double-platinum, shifting more than a million copies.
With its famous chorus – “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em/ Know when to walk away and know when to run” – the song’s power, Schlitz believed, was that it told a story but “had no finished ending. It allowed the listener to be involved. It respected the intelligence of the listener.”
In 1976 he was working as a night computer operator at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and generally had a few quiet hours to write: “I had access to a typewriter at the computer lab,” he recalled.
He was playing a stack of his unfinished songs from his night stints to the Texan singer/songwriter Jimmy Rushing; the one he had least confidence in was The Gambler, and he left it till last – only for Rushing to tell him: “That’s the one you’ve got to finish.”
“Something more than me wrote that song, I’m convinced of that,” Schlitz said later. “I really had no idea where the song was coming from. There was something going through my head, which was my father.”
He hawked the completed song round Nashville for a couple of years, and at one point there were three different versions in the top 100, including one by Schlitz himself, and Johnny Cash recorded it for his album Gone Girl.
But its potential was truly realised when Kenny Rogers picked it up. It became one of his signature numbers and turbocharged the album of the same name, which went on to sell more than 5 million copies around the world: “When I go to Korea or Hong Kong people say ‘Ah, the gambler!’” Rogers wrote in the sleeve notes of his 1998 box set Through the Years.
It won Rogers a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. In 2017, The Gambler was added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Donald Alan Schlitz was born on August 29 1952, in Durham, North Carolina, one of three children of Donald Schlitz and Betty Lou, née Collins. She was a histopathologist at Duke University, while his father was a police captain.
Don briefly attended Duke, but dropped out and moved to Nashville to seek his fortune as a songwriter, which was soon aided by his night job at Vanderbilt. He was befriended by Bob McDill, one of Nashville’s foremost songwriters, who told him: “You will get 10 songs a year from inspiration, but your job is to write 40 or more songs that can get on the radio.”
Taking the advice to heart, Schlitz maintained a prolific output, and other musicians who had hits with his songs included Randy Travis (On the Other Hand and the Grammy-winning Forever and Ever, Amen), the Judds (I Know Where I’m Going), the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (I Love Only You), Tanya Tucker (I Won’t Take Less Than Your Love) and Mary Chapin Carpenter (He Thinks He’ll Keep Her).
He also wrote the theme song for President George HW Bush’s Points of Light charity; recorded by Randy Travis, it went to No 3 in the country charts in 1991.
Schlitz became a senior figure on the Nashville scene. He established the celebrated “songwriters’ circles” at the Bluebeard Café and volunteered at Room in the Inn, a charity assisting the homeless.
The Gambler took on a life of its own, and the England rugby union team adopted it as their song for the 2007 World Cup; it carried them to the final at Twickenham, but they were beaten by South Africa.
In 2020, he said, Schlitz contemplated retirement – in order to stop thinking about songwriting. He is survived by his wife Stacey and by a daughter and son.
Don Schlitz, born August 29 1952, died April 16 2026