Ray Price – Burning Memories
“Danny Boy,” based upon an old Irish folk song called “Londonderry Air” from the 19th century, is one of those songs that draws great big voices to it like a moth to a flame, often with similarly fatal results. Through the years, everyone from Bing Crosby to Conway Twitty (in a rockabilly version) to Elvis Presley to Jackie Wilson have taken their turn. Price had known the song for years, but it came to his attention at this point in his career because his pedal steel player, Buddy Emmons, had been including an instrumental version of the song during the Cherokee Cowboys’ opening sets and had encouraged Price to sing it.
“Every year at the disc jockey convention,” Price recalls, “Columbia and all the record labels would have their shows each night for the disc jockeys to showcase their talent. And always I closed the Columbia show…with ‘San Antonio Rose’. But I went out and closed the show, and stopped it, with’ Danny Boy’. And for three years I would close the show with ‘Danny Boy’, and all of the disc jockeys said, ‘Come on, man, record that song, record the song.’ And I finally did. Clive Davis [then a Columbia executive] was the one who let me do ‘Danny Boy’. And after I did it, they ostracized my butt right out of the business.”
Well, not out of the business exactly. “Danny Boy” was a #9 country hit, far more successful on radio than, say, “Night Life” had been, and the subsequent album went to #3. But it definitely met resistance at country radio. The fact that the record was nearly five minutes long probably didn’t help much and, what’s more, the music backing Price’s vocal was nothing like what he’d killed the house with at the DJ convention. The Ray Price Beat was gone, replaced with an arrangement that, in the quietest spots, was nothing more than bass and piano. In the loud spots, an enormous wall of strings burst out of the silence with all the emotional power of sunlight breaking through clouds to shift and shimmer across a dark meadow. It was beautiful, like so much of Price’s music, but in a new way. And, despite all the clues, it was not what people had expected. Characteristically, Price dug in his heels at the objections, pushing forward with the sound he knew had been in him all along.
“Some of the jockeys that had wanted me to record the damn song got on my case,” Price remembers. “Like in Houston, over the air, they swore they’d never play another Ray Price record.” For a time, Price toured less, partly because he was so hurt that some fans had turned on him, partly because it’s tough to tour with an orchestra. And when he did play out, some fans stayed away because, as it turns out, it’s tough to two-step with an orchestra too. But Price stuck stubbornly, admirably, to the pop sound he adored.
On his terms, it paid off. “Danny Boy” was hardly a failure on the country charts, and on the pop side it climbed all the way to #60, the biggest crossover success he’d ever had. Appropriately enough, it was even possible during this period, on some Top-40 stations, to hear Ray Price sing “Danny Boy” back-to-back with Engelbert Humperdinck’s hit version of “Release Me”, the very song that had begun Price’s journey back to pop nearly 15 years before.
Price sings “Danny Boy” with both restraint and exuberance. His voice starts low and tentative, soars to a place he had been taking us for years, and then beyond that to a place he’d only dreamed of. His voice sighs, cracks, and as he rises up to the final lines, he grants this hoary old tale of love beyond the grave a dignity and power that can’t be denied.
“You will call and tell me that you love me/And I shall sleep in peace till you come,” he cries. In that moment, you can hear a singer gripping the limits of his very own legend, then letting it go for something he loves more.
“Danny Boy” did not conclude the Ray Price story, but it signaled the beginning of the second volume. During the fallout from the song, Price left Nashville and moved back to Texas, where he remains today. In the same period, he hired Moses “Blondie” Calderon, the pianist, bandleader and musical director who ever since has functioned for Price something like Ralph Sharon functions for Tony Bennett. In 1969, he married the woman to whom he remains married today. And, some three decades later, he’s still a pop singer.
To Price, though, he always was, and still is, simply a singer of good songs, no matter their origin. “It’s hard for me to make the distinction between country and pop,” he has said consistently to anyone who has asked, “because music is music.” Certainly his post-“Danny Boy” career has supported this point of view. Despite being accused in some quarters of betraying country music for pop, Price had country hits in the two years following “Danny Boy” at only a slightly less successful rate (three top ten records and four in the top twenty) than he had in the years immediately preceding the switch. The three albums released after the “Danny Boy” single all went top ten.
And this was before he recorded “For The Good Times” the country chart-topper and #11 crossover smash from 1970 that has defined him ever since. “I would say ‘Danny Boy” and ‘For The Good Times’ are the best songs I’ve ever got to sing,” he says. “For The Good Times” ushered in perhaps his career’s most successful period; in its aftermath, Price ruled the country charts, scoring four #1 country hits and two #2s in just over three years.
The eight albums he released after “Danny Boy” but before he left Columbia in 1975 deserve an essay of their own. Stunning strings, arranged by countrypolitan fixture Cam Mullins, provide the primary background on these records, though acoustic guitar and pedal steel still get their licks in now and then. Price’s voice is the center of attention, though, along with his choice of material, which remained impeccable and undeniably country. A list of the folks who provided the songs for these albums reads like a roll call for a country songwriters hall of fame — Bryant, Clement, Cochran, Gibson, Hall, Howard, Kristofferson, Nelson, Newbury, Payne, Putnam, Robbins, Rose, Russell, Weatherly, Webb, Williams.
“For The Good Times” is representative of the era, in both its stunning sound and its expression of complex adult emotion. Mullins’ strings intensify the melancholy mood, assisting in the seduction and cushioning the inevitable blow. The clopping, pulsing drum and tic-tac are clearly country in feel, ticking away the final moments of the love story at the heart of the song. Like nearly everything Price recorded in these years, “For The Good Times” sounds like a man is speaking to you, commanding and ultimately earning your emotional commitment.