Kenny Rogers' final tour before retiring includes concert at Thrasher-Horne on Saturday

Kenny Rogers has pretty much done it all as an entertainer.

In more than 50 years of nonstop success, he’s sold more than 120 million records, won a whole bunch of music awards and made hit movies. He was inducted in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2013. Always a crowd pleaser, he even got raves for a 30-second commercial for Geico a few years ago.

And at 78, Rogers is ready to put professional ambitions aside and focus on family.

He wasn’t around a lot when his children from previous marriages were growing up and he was so entrenched in his career, he said.

That’s going to change this spring when Rogers wraps up his farewell tour to become a full-time family man to his wife and their twin sons, who are 12.

He is not saying goodbye, however, without giving fans plenty of opportunities to see him perform. The tour, which began last May, has taken him from Tulsa and Memphis to Singapore and Dublin, along with many other stops around the globe.

Rogers’ concert on Saturday at the Thrasher-Horne Center in Orange Park concludes the Florida portion of the tour.

“I’ve done everything I set out to do, every goal I set out to do for myself,” he said in a telephone interview. “There’s a point where you have to say, ‘I’ve had my turn. Let someone else have it.’

“And that’s kind of where I am. It’s not that I dislike music, it’s just that I can’t keep doing this, and do what I want to do, which is spend time with my family.”

Rogers was upfront about another reason retirement feels right: “I’m not as mobile as I used to be, and it’s not as easy for me to get around.” (Do an internet search for “Kenny Rogers health” and topics such as knee-replacement surgery and rotator cuff come up.)

Still, he’s excited about offering a night of music that chronologically takes audiences from his days with The Scholars (a Texas rock band) to the Bobby Doyle Trio (jazz) to The First Edition (pop and country) to a solo career that generated such hits as “Lucille,” “The Gambler,” “Coward of the County,” “Love Will Turn You Around” and “Through the Years.”

Rogers also scored big hits with duets with the likes of Dottie West (“Every Time Two Fools Collide”), Dolly Parton (“Islands in the Stream”) Sheena Easton (“We’ve Got Tonight”) and Kim Carnes (“Don’t Fall in Love With a Dreamer”).

Those songs have helped him become one of the best-selling recording artists of all time. Rogers’ formula for success, he said, is fairly simple: Try to be just a little bit different from everybody else.

“I have this theory in the music business,” he said, “that you can either do what everyone else is doing, and do it better — and I never liked my chances; I couldn’t do what Johnny Cash and Waylon and Willie and those guys did and do it better — or you can do something totally different, and then you stand out, because there’s no way to invite comparison.

“And that’s where I’ve been most comfortable. And the ballads I did, I came up through jazz, so I had a little more experience in singing those types of songs, which I think really helped me through the years.”

Because he wasn’t “typical country,” he said, “I think I did invite people into country music that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. … And the great thing about country is, once you get into it, you don’t get out of it. It’s a very personal music, and no other music can say that.”

Rogers, one of the kings of crossover hits, said that good lyrics help a song find multiple audiences: “ ‘She Believes in Me,’ ’You Decorated My Life’ … They weren’t country songs. They were just songs with great messages.”

Lyrics are “the great memory maker,” he said, and are in large part what make a song timeless.

“I try to say what every man would like to say, and what every woman would like to hear,” he said. “And if you do that, you get both crews.”

His catalog of hits is too extensive to promise that everyone’s favorites will get played in one show. But Rogers is doing his best to please as many fans as possible.

“Interestingly enough, I sent out my brochures to my fan club, and I said, is there a specific song that you’re afraid I won’t do if you come to the show that you’d like to hear? And I can’t tell you how many people wrote back and said “Love Lifted Me” [one of his first singles as a solo artist to become a hit].”

So it’s on his setlist. “It’s pretty cool,” he said. “I really enjoy doing it, and I treat it very special.”

A world tour suggests worldwide appeal, but Rogers was modest in acknowledging it.

“If I had to boil it down, I would say, the availability [of the music]. It started off with whatever the radio station is that plays American music around the world. They played it for me, which was very nice.

“And, I think that country music itself is very simple. I’ve met so many people from [around the world] who say, ‘I learned to speak English listening to your music.’

“And you forget that, in country music, if it hurts, you say it hurts. You don’t use all that superfluous stuff.”

David Crumpler: (904) 359-4164

Kenny Rogers

Final World Tour: The Gambler’s Last Deal

8 p.m. Saturday at the Thrasher-Horne Center, 283 College Drive, Orange Park

$49-$89