Ray Price
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Ray Price is such a man – such a legend. He started out doing local dancehalls and honky tonks in his native Texas and was very much in the style of other honky-tonkers like Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce and Lefty Frizzell. He met and quickly became close friends with Hank Williams about a year before Hank’s unfortunate death. The two lived and toured together much of that last year and on more than one occasion, Ray was called upon to go out and hold the audience in abeyance while they were trying to find Hank or pour enough coffee into him to get him on stage. Ray would go on stage, sing some of Hank’s songs, make apologies and, always the gentleman, defend the honor and name of his good friend. When speaking of those times, Ray’s voice often trails off and the eyes seem to focus on some image we cannot see. Then, he usually changes the subject. When Hank died, Ray Price was the heir apparent to the legacy, even inheriting Hank’s band, The Drifting Cowboys. But he wasn’t content to be lumped with all the Hank Williams “clones” who were popping up all over the place at the time. He put together his own band, The Cherokee Cowboys, and dug up some of his East Texas roots, combined them with some ideas from Bob Wills, the king of Texas Swing and invented a dance beat that has become a staple of country music. That 4/4 shuffle beat that was first heard on Crazy Arms is still used by country bands the world over and, in the Nashville studios, they still call it the “Ray Price beat.” In short, he reinvented himself.
Time has weathered his ruggedly handsome features but it has only enhanced and enriched the timber of his distinctively unique voice. Those of us who have listened to the gradual evolution of Ray Price over the many years of his career may lose sight of how much he has changed. If you’re fortunate enough to have a good library of Ray Price records, be they re-mastered CD’s or good old vinyl LP’s (and yes, he made at least one recording on the 78 rpm format), you can go back and listen to those early honky tonk songs and listen as he adds, not twin fiddles, but three. Go for the groove as he employs a drum kit in the band and couples that drumbeat with both an electric and a stand-up bass doubling the bass line. And while you’re listening to that 4/4 shuffle on the original version of Crazy Arms, notice how much his voice resembles that of his mentor, Hank Williams.
When Elvis hit the scene and rockabilly and rock and roll were swallowing up country fans like an aardvark on an anthill, Ray Price stayed country. He was a leading force in a small but determined movement that is credited by some with the very survival of traditional country music. Even when the Nashville Sound was so successfully emanating from Studio B and that funny looking Quonset down the street, Ray Price stayed country.
But at some point Ray changed from the cowboy clothes to dress suits, his voice mellowed and his sound grew to strings and choruses instead of fiddles and steel. Songs like For The Good Times, Burning Memories and I Won’t Mention It Again opened the ears of thousands of new Ray Price fans. The purists called him a traitor for selling out to pop but most heralded him as an icebreaker who was bringing country up town and making it as welcome in a posh nightclub as it had always been in roadhouses and dancehalls all across the country. What a difference there was between those new recordings and the honky tonk / swing of old. Ray Price had re-invented himself again, to the chagrin of some but to the delight of many more.
It is a true pleasure to be able to write about a man who is truly a living legend, who’s been in the business for over fifty years and is still going strong and attracting new fans all the time. In fact, at age 74, he has a new album, Prisoner of Love, which releases May 16th on Buddha/Justice Records. It promises to be another shining example of the Ray Price mastery of song. If you’re a Ray Price fan or just a fan of great music, you can’t go wrong on this one.
So, for those of you readers who’ve asked us why we haven’t done a Legends article on Ray, we thought about it and decided that, as Ray said when Kris Kristofferson handed him the plaque inducting him into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996, “It’s about time.”
A lot of country fans of my generation or thereabouts like to bemoan the fact that today’s country music is changing. We like to point back to our heroes of the past and say, “Now, that was country!” We tend to forget that, at the time when our icons were at their peak, there were members of an equally disgruntled older generation of fans who were bemoaning just as loudly as we do today. We forget that it is precisely this evolution of the art that keeps it alive and that what gave our heroes their status was the fact that, in many cases, they were the innovators. The thing that sets legends apart from the rest of the crowd is that they are different and they’re not afraid to break new ground and be different.
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