“He wanted to do everything straight up, and didn’t want special treatment,” says Jack Rogers, who recounts a harrowing event that reflects his brother’s bravery while eerily presaging his death decades later. While riding on the family farm, he says, the brothers and some friends tied their horses to a tree on a hilly bank abutting the Chattahoochee River. One horse slipped and plunged into the river, its foreleg tangled its reins. “We were standing there in shock,” recalls Jack Rogers. “But Jimmy was the first in water. Somehow, he got the bridal loose from this drowning horse, which was going berserk, and he saved the horse. Now, Jimmy wasn’t reckless. He was calculating. But he never hesitated to act.”
lahassee and opened a downstairs grotto club called the Baffled Knight. Those three, the Baffled Knights, were the house act. By 1966, although Rogers was a seasoned performer, fame had continued to elude him. So he took a trip to Massachusetts, where he planned to interview for a job at Cambridge Seven Design, a respected architecture firm. If architecture was indeed his destiny, then at least he needed to establish an identity away from Florida, outside his father’s substantial shadow. “I think he would have taken the job,” says Jack Rogers. The fact that he instead wound up joining a nationally known singing group was, well, serendipitous.
THE BAFFLED KNIGHT
IT WAS SERENDIPITY
After graduating from Winter Park High School in 1955, Rogers enrolled at the University of Virginia. While there, he met several times with Nobel laureate William Faulkner, the school’s writer-in-residence, whom he idolized. At the end of his junior year, Rogers decided to skip final exams and left Charlottesville to take guitar lessons from jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd in Washington, D.C. Notes Jack Rogers, with his family’s gift for ironic understatement, this resulted in his brother being “excused from the University of Virginia, for at least a year.” Back in Winter Park, Rogers enrolled at Rollins, where he befriended English professor Edwin Granberry, author, essayist and mentor of Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind. Granberry composed a glowing recommendation that helped his young protégé get into DeLand’s Stetson University, which had a writing program that the venerable O. Henry Award winner thought would be ideal for Rogers. Jack Rogers still has the letter, carefully folded and typed on onionskin paper. In it, Granberry describes Rogers as possessing “unusual intellectual potential” and being “the most pronounced writing talent of my 25 years in teaching.” Rogers spent a year at Stetson before putting aside formal higher education for good. He had drifted through four years at three different colleges, majoring in architecture, English and philosophy. Yet he had no degree to show for his effort. Again he returned to Winter Park and ensconced himself in his parents’ guest house, where he spent the better part of a year working on a book before declaring that he simply wasn’t ready to write anything worth reading. “I assume it was somewhat autobiographical; a coming-of-age type story,” says Jack Rogers. “I think he destroyed the manuscript. I never saw it.” He later worked for a year in his father’s architecture office, where he displayed an intuitive gift for design. Jack Rogers believes that his brother could have been a top-tier architect, although
Rollins College English professor Edwin Granberry called Rogers, who attended three colleges over four years but never earned a degree, “the most pronounced writing talent of my 25 years in teaching.”
only one of his designs saw construction — the Orange County Juvenile Detention Center, in which he used bulletproof glass instead of bars. Nothing, however, could deter Rogers from performing. He played locally at Dubsdread, Harrigan’s, the Beef & Bottle and a coffeehouse at Rollins. He also appeared at folk clubs in surrounding cities, most notably the El Prado Lounge in Winter Garden and Stuckey’s Saloon in Lakeland, where he was often joined by friends Paul Champion, a banjo player, and Jim Ballew, a guitarist. Chip Weston, a local artist who attended Rollins in the ’60s, was playing with a bluegrass group at the college when he met Rogers. “There weren’t a whole lot of musicians, so it was standard practice to jam with whoever was around on a weekly basis,” says Weston. “Jimmy and his stories and his music were so refreshing because they weren’t trying to reinvent themselves or their music to fit mainstream success.” But in a family of achievers, was such an esoteric career path acceptable? “Our parents, especially our dad, understood pretty well,” says Jack Rogers. “My mother was flexible. Neither of them tried to discourage him. But we had uncles who would say, ‘When are you going to get a real job?’ Jimmy would just walk out of the room when that happened.” Rogers, Champion and Ballew moved to Tal-
While in Massachusetts, a friend persuaded Rogers to take a side trip to New York City to watch auditions for the Serendipity Singers, a popular folk group that had reached the Top 10 with “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down (Crooked Little Man)” two years earlier. Rogers, unimpressed with mediocre showings from the other musicians in attendance, borrowed a guitar and ambled onstage. Although it was a spur-of-the-moment performance, he was offered a job singing and playing lead, acoustic and electric guitars. Because of Rogers’ storytelling skills, he also became the group’s front man, setting the scene for their songs when they appeared on such network mainstays as The Tonight Show, The Ed Sullivan Show and Hootenanny. Success offered Rogers a sense of validation, but he soon began to feel restless and out of place. “I was merely a hired gun, so to speak,’’ he told the Orlando Sentinel in 1987. “I simply signed on with an already established group.’’ He left the Serendipity Singers after two years to pursue a solo career, relocating to the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, which had a thriving folk music scene. From there, he built up a circuit of coffeehouses and clubs in St. Augustine, Gainesville and Tallahassee. Finding that well-crafted acoustic songs weren’t always enough to hold a rowdy crowd’s attention, he honed his storytelling, which would later be described as a combination of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, if either humorist had been a Floridian. By the early 1970s, Rogers was playing across the U.S. and Canada. In 1974, when he appeared at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, PBS taped his performance for nationwide broadcast. The following year, the network produced a television special, Gamble Rogers: Live at the Exit In, which originated in Nashville. Indeed, Rogers’ literary bent and subversive approach to Southern humor seemed tailor-made for PBS. He was a current-events commentator S PRING 2 0 1 6 | W IN T ER PARK MAGAZ IN E
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