Ray Price ponders a record Dec. 12, 1959, as he talks to a friend. He had three records in the Top 20 that week. (Photo: Gerald Holly / The Tennessean
Ray Price ponders a record Dec. 12, 1959, as he talks to a friend. He had three records in the Top 20 that week. (Photo: Gerald Holly / The Tennessean
NASHVILLE -- The great Ray Price was old and dying, with a doctor's hopeless news echoing in his head.
His wife, Janie, cried about all of this: the pancreatic cancer, the depression, the exhausting treatments that delayed disconsolate inevitability. The whole thing was torture for both of them, and the glorious facts of a remarkable life — Price's Country Music Hall of Fame plaque, his decades of hits, his more than 50 albums, his contributions in shaping the history of a music that has helped form a nation's culture — were insufficient consolation.
And so she asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his time, figuring he might be most comfortable resting on their Texas farm, gently tending to his horses or his trees.
No, he said, weak and certain.
"He said, 'I want to cut another album: I want to lay down one last one before I leave this world,' " Janie Price says.
"It was his love of music that carried him back into the studio and brought him out of this sadness that we'd fallen into. It was a terrible time, going through chemotherapy and radiation and all the complications, but he never lost focus of what it was he wanted to do. After each crisis, he would say, 'I've got to get hold of Fred, get back to Nashville and get back to work on this album.' "
Advice taken
"Fred" is, Fred Foster , one of the most heralded producers in American music and the producer of Price's Grammy-winning duet with Willie Nelson , Lost Highway.
Foster is the man who produced Roy Orbison's biggest hits and major works for Kris Kristofferson , Dolly Parton , Ray Stevens , Larry Gatlin , Grandpa Jones and many more. He's also the man who met Ray Price on a slurry night in the mid-1950s and offered frank critique.
"He said, 'I'm Ray Price, what's your name?' " Foster says. "I told him my name and said, 'You know, you need to quit trying to sound like Hank Williams . He's dead. You need to sound like Ray Price.' I must have been out of my mind to say that. I'd had my adult beverages."
Soon after that conversation, Price did, indeed, quit trying to sound like Hank Williams. He established a trademark vocal style, he set his melodies to a distinctive, shuffling rhythm, and he recorded mega-hits Crazy Arms and City Lights (the latter of which launched the career of Bill Anderson, who today stands with Price as a Country Music Hall of Famer).
Flush with success, Price saw Foster in the lobby of the Andrew Jackson Hotel.
"Took your advice, hoss," Price said, and the men were fast friends.
In the new century, Foster helmed the Grammy-winning Last Of The Breed project, which found Price teaming with Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, both of whom point to Price as a major influence.
Then he called Foster.
"I think I've got one more in me," he said. "Will you help?"
He would, and he did, and the resulting album, Beauty Is, was released April 15 on AmeriMonte Records, four months after Price's death at age 87.
'How much I love you'
Price recorded the album while battling for his life, but Beauty Is trades on loveliness and gratitude, with lush strings cushioning Price's vocals. Asked by WSM air personality Eddie Stubbs if any vocal tuning or other digital enhancements — technology that aids nearly every modern major-label country recording — were used, engineer Kyle Lehning laughed and said, "Oh, no. Ray Price was a professional."
Foster sent what Janie Price describes as "gobs of songs" for Price to consider, and Price would drive slowly up and down Texas country roads in his GMC Sierra pickup, listening to the music.
"If he heard one he loved, he'd call me and say, 'Meet me out front, I've got to play you something,' " she says. "I'd get in the truck and he'd play it. Ray had a physical reaction to songs that moved him. I'd listen with him and watch the look on his face."
Price internalized the songs and made them his own.
"The way he phrased, it was like he was caressing the song, like it was a beautiful woman," Foster says. "When he sang, it was like he was actually living the words of the song. Just the way he sings the word 'broken' in Among My Souvenirs , that gives you the whole story. If he'd just sung that one word, that would have been enough."
Excepting the lament I Wish I Was 18 Again and the gentle spiritual I Believe, the album is filled with love songs. Janie noted her husband's intense interest in finding the right material and was surprised when he accepted her long-voiced suggestion to record the romantic theme song from the Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr film, An Affair To Remember.
"Ray wasn't a mushy man, and there wasn't all of that 'I love you' stuff," says Janie Price, married to the singer since the early 1980s. "If I asked, he'd say, 'I would not have married you if I hadn't have loved you.' "
Last year, the Prices were riding home after a painful physical therapy session when Ray Price's phone rang. It was Foster calling from Nashville, saying he'd finished mixing the album and that the mixes would be arriving at the Prices' ranch the next day, via overnight express mail.
Then Foster asked to speak with Janie.
When she took the phone, Foster said, "We've got it all done, but I have one question: How does it feel to be the most loved woman in the world?"
"I said, 'What do you mean?' " she says. "And Fred said, 'Ray told me he was dedicating this album to you.' I was overwhelmed. I had to pull into the Walgreens parking lot."
There in the GMC, the great, old and dying Ray Price turned to his wife.
"He said, 'All these years, you've asked me if I really loved you, and I have been remiss in telling you how I feel,' " Janie Price says. "He said, 'I've done this for you. I want you to have it to listen to when I'm not here, to hear me telling you how much I love you.' "
The next day, Foster's mixes arrived, and the couple got in the truck and listened together, hearing Martina McBride duet with Price on An Affair To Remember, Vince Gill's harmonies on Beauty Lies In the Eyes Of the Beholder and Until Then.
"As each one would play, he'd get that look on his face," she says. "The song would finish and he'd say, 'What do you think?' I was crying, holding a box of Kleenex , nodding at him."
She still goes through facial tissues when listening to Beauty Is.
She hears her husband sing and thinks about that look he'd get on his face. She thinks about a pickup and a drugstore parking lot.
She thinks about the things people said when he died, that he was among country music's most important and most emotionally compelling singers, and thinks about how he was careful not to reveal his own emotions except when singing into a microphone.
Janie Price never answered Foster's question, "How does it feel to be the most loved woman in the world?"
It's not an easy answer. It feels pretty good, but then there's all the crying.
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