The country music icon famed for “Crazy Arms” and “For the Good Times” was 87 when he passed away Dec. 16.
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It may difficult to imagine someone so ingratiatingly gentlemanly as the late, great Ray Price as a hard-core rebel. But the beloved country music icon – who passed away Dec. 16 at his ranch outside Mount Pleasant, Texas at age 87 – was never one to shy away from defying convention. Remember: This is the fellow who boldly announced, “There ain't no chains strong enough to hold me. Ain't no breeze big enough to slow me.”
He might have added: And no rule tough enough to limit him.
As New York Times writer Bill Friskics-Warren noted in The Newspaper of Record’s respectful obituary, Price “was at the forefront of two revolutions in country music as one of its finest ballad singers and biggest hit makers.” He began his decades-long career in show business during the 1940s as a traditional country artist – he was at one point both friend and, briefly, roommate to Hank Williams – but later polished his distinctive sound as the soulful baritone evolved from a honkytonk man to a smooth crooner.
“I was never afraid to take a chance,” he once told an interviewer. “I’d rather be sorry for something I’ve done than something I didn’t do.”
Price made his first significant break from country music convention in 1956, when his trademark version of “Crazy Arms” hit No. 1 on the country charts – and then scored on the pop charts as well. During the original recording session, he recalled in a 1998 Washington Post interview, “We were having trouble getting a good, clean bass sound. So instead of going with the standard 2/4 beat, I said, ‘Let’s try a 4/4 bass and a shuffle rhythm,’ and it cut. It cut clean through.”
In a Los Angeles Times essay written shortly after Price’s death, Merle Haggard remembered being immediately intrigued by this fresh new sound: “The beat he came up with, what they call ‘the Ray Price shuffle,’ what it was, was an attempt to not sound like Bob Wills. He started that little shuffle thing and it caught on really good. ‘Crazy Arms’ was the benchmark — that's when it started, and it spread all over the state of Texas and really, all over the world. It was a staple.”
Throughout the late 1950s and early ‘60s, Price turned to several up-and-coming Nashville songwriters for new material, providing early breaks for such notables as Roger Miller (“Invitation to the Blues”), Mel Tillis (“Burning Memories”) -- and Willie Nelson, who wrote “Night Life,” the title cut for Price’s chart-topping 1963 album, and toured as a bass player with Price’s band, The Cherokee Cowboys, before pursuing his own path to stardom.
(“Without a Ray Price,” Nelson wrote in a moving tribute read at Price’s memorial service, “there wouldn’t have been a Willie Nelson.”)
But Price really didn’t begin his second revolution until he recorded Hank Cochran’s “Make the World Go Away,” a Top 10 single that producers Don Law and Frank Jones enhanced with background singers, a lush string orchestration and other elements that would come to define the so-called “countrypolitan” sound. Price continued in this vein with such recordings as “Danny Boy,” his 1967 version of the melancholy Irish folk tune, and, most successfully, “For the Good Times” (1970), the classic Kris Kristofferson tune about lovers savoring cherished memories even as they prepare to end their romance.
With the release of the latter single – which soared to No. 1 on the country charts, and stalled just short of the pop Top 10 – the transformation was complete. “Price’s new uptown style redefined him,” writes Kurt Wolff in Country Music: The Rough Guide. “It alienated many of his hardcore country fans, but it gave him a newer, broader pop audience and kept him at or near the top of the charts well into the ‘70s.”
Of course, many old fans were more than accepting of the change. CBS newscaster and country music devotee Bob Schieffer says he never wavered in his appreciation of Price. “His songs had a way of getting in your head and staying there,” the Face the Nation host told Cowboys & Indians. “You'd hear ‘Heartache by the Numbers’ on the radio driving to work and you'd find yourself singing it all day. It just cut through whatever you were thinking about. And at the same time, he was kind of the bridge from Hank Williams to Willie Nelson and George Jones.”
Although he never again cracked the country Top 10 after charting with the 1981 “Diamonds in the Stars,” Price remained a top draw on concert tours well into the 21st century. In 2007, he joined forces with fellow legends Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard to record Last of the Breed, a critically acclaimed two-disc collection of standards and new compositions.
Price and Nelson wound up winning the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals, for the duet rendition of “Lost Highway.” And all three country greats toured together to promote the CD.
“Every night,” Haggard would later report, Price “was politely giving me and Willie a vocal lesson. He's always been a great singer — a real first-class vocalist. I don't think anybody will argue with that. He holds that microphone right on his chest and he never moves it. Willie and I are all over the mike trying to get sound, but he's found it.”
Price placed more than 100 singles on the country charts, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996. And he felt confident enough about his approach to music to dismiss anyone who claimed he wasn’t “pure country” enough.
"I just like what I've done and how it's worked out,” he told Rolling Stone magazine during one of his final interviews. “And it’s been great.”