Ray Price – Burning Memories
At first, these variations from the Ray Price Beat remained secrets of the studio. But when he released “I’ll Be There (When You Get Lonely)” later in the year — the song was a fairly generic stab at post-Elvis pop balladry, but he nails the thing — it climbed to #12 on the country charts.
A few months later, Price released Four Hits By Ray Price, an EP of Nashville Sound covers: Ferlin Huskey’s “Gone”, The Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love”, Jim Reeves’ “Four Walls”, and Jimmy C. Newman’s “A Falling Star”, each a major country-to-pop crossover hit. “That’s What It’s Like To Be Lonesome”, a top ten hit, featured the Anita Kerr Singers. The grand “City Lights” was, in the words of historian Daniel Cooper, “a fusion of the Nashville Sound with the Ray Price Beat.” By this point, the pop side of Price wasn’t a secret anymore.
“I think strings are beautiful,” Ray Price says. “They’re the closest thing to the human voice for me. Singing in front of them is like being lifted in an elevator. And if the strings can turn me on, I’m able to turn them on and it becomes a good night.”
Strings had been used on a country music session at least as early as 1955, when Eddy Arnold re-recorded “The Cattle Call” up in New York City. But by the time Price included strings on sessions half a decade later, they were still nearly unheard-of in country music, a few years of the Nashville Sound notwithstanding.
The result, 1960’s Faith album, was a reverent, often dramatic affair and Price’s most explicitly pop recording to date. Throughout, Price’s tenor soars in a way that harkens back to the WWII-era pop music of his youth, while the hushed arrangements anticipate, somewhat, Elvis’ gospel album, How Great Thou Art, released later in the year. (Not surprisingly, either, since Price’s and Presley’s recordings often shared a cadre of musicians: guitarist Hank Garland, bassist Bob Moore, drummer Buddy Harman and pianist Floyd Cramer.)
“I wanted strings,” Price remembers, “and Columbia wanted me to do a faith album. So…I asked Don Law, who is gone now and who was a great producer for me…can I do these things different. He says what do you want to do. I said, well, to tell you the truth, I want to sing these religious songs like love songs. ‘Cause to me that’s what they are. I’d like to get a lot of violins behind it and get some arrangements made. So we got Anita Kerr to make the arrangements and I used seventeen strings.”
Country historian Rich Kienzle, in his liner notes to the Bear Family collection Ray Price & the Cherokee Cowboys, disputes Price’s claim of a seventeen-piece string section. “Aural evidence and Columbia recording session ledgers show only four present,” Keinzle writes. The issue is further confused because the discography for the same set lists neither four nor seventeen string players, but six. Whatever the number, strings are featured on Faith, and Price sings these old hymns like love songs. Those two tacts, the strings and the singing approach, seemed to sum up where Price had been headed all along.
Over the next few years, he released a number of hits in his classic shuffle style — “Heart Over Mind” and “Pride” are the best-known — and also paid tribute to western swing legend Bob Wills on the album San Antonio Rose. In hindsight, these years can seem as if Price was momentarily treading water, hesitant to get in over his head with the country-pop blend he’d been building toward for a decade. But after the hard shuffle “Walk Me To The Door” and the slow ballad “Take Her Off My Hands”, each with orchestra-enhanced arrangements, became a two-sided hit in early 1963, Price’s inner pop singer surfaced as never before.
The album he set it loose upon was Night Life, revered today as a honky-tonk classic. There can be no doubt that it is. But within the context of Price’s career, it should also be remembered as one of his earliest and most cohesive arguments that country and pop are, in some important sense, “the same thing.”
Price accorded “Lonely Street”, a pop hit for Andy Williams in 1959, a prominent position on the album; he belted “Bright Lights And Blonde Haired Women” like he’d been studying Louis Prima; and on yet another version of “Let Me Talk To You” — this time with a string section to help persuade his lover to “fall in love again” — Price was as pop, and as seductive, as at any moment in his career. The title track, with Buddy Emmons’ bluesy, horn-like pedal steel swapping sad tales with Pig Robbins’ morose piano, feels like a honky-tonk version of Sinatra’s saloon classic “Only The Lonely”.
In the wake of Night Life, four of Price’s next six chart entries included prominent string arrangements. The most significant and successful of these was his recording of the Hank Cochran classic “Make The World Go Away”, which went to #2 in 1964. Price originally recorded the song as a shuffle, but he rearranged and re-recorded it, ultimately releasing a version with overdubbed strings and a backing chorus.
In striking contrast to the strings swirling extravagantly about him, Price sings his first line, “And get it off my shoulders,” quietly, subdued, just as he had begun so many of those Night Life sides. Because he opens close to a whisper, he can build to a scream. By the time he unleashes the line again at the choruses — “just get it off, off of my shoulders!” — we can feel just how dangerously the world is pressing down upon this man, and how much power he has granted to the woman he believes can relieve the weight.
“Make The World Go Away” is vulnerable, desperate, beautiful pop music. Price’s version squeezed onto Billboard’s Hot 100; just two years later, a similar but considerably less impassioned version of the song by Eddy Arnold rose to #6 on the pop charts.
And then, after one final burst of Night Life-styled honky-tonk in ’65 and ’66 — or one final period of foot-dragging, depending upon your view — he cut “Danny Boy”, the record that had been trying to come out of him for years.