Vince Gill and Paul Franklin follow up 2013's Bakersfield with a new collection, Sweet Memories, honoring the varied hits of legend Ray Price and his band, The Cherokee Cowboys.
It’s a kind of magic when Vince Gill and Paul Franklin apply their talents to the great American country music songbook.
A decade ago, the two Nashville luminaries took inspiration from Merle Haggard and Buck Owens on the acclaimed throwback record Bakersfield, a muscular collection of ’60s and ’70s classics. Franklin’s unparalleled steel guitar and Gill’s spot-on vocals and lead guitar made decades-old tunes such as “Foolin’ Around” and “The Bottle Let Me Down” sound urgent and propulsive again. “Branded Man” and “Holding Things Together” became achingly beautiful duets between singer and steel player.
Bakersfield was a remarkable piece of work, deserving of the awards it won and of the countless hours it spent in my family’s car CD player. Although we are still not tired of it, we can give it a break for the best of reasons: Franklin and Gill have a new collection of classics coming out Friday.
Sweet Memories (out Aug, 4) finds the two musical friends tackling the wildly varied but always melodic hits of Texas country legend Ray Price. Where Owens and Haggard represented a hardscrabble, working-man aesthetic, Price’s highly respected oeuvre evolved from groundbreaking shuffle-beat honky-tonk anthems to elegantly produced Nashville countrified pop befitting only the most skilled vocalists. Price could do it all, which makes his material an ideal fit for the equally nimble Gill and Franklin.
“He was a stylist that always evolved,” Franklin tells us in a video call with the guys from Gill’s studio. “Price created what in Texas you call the four-four shuffle. He brought that to the forefront in country music, with ‘Crazy Arms’ and his other greatest hits.”
And there’s Price’s equally influential backing band, the Cherokee Cowboys, in which the likes of Willie Nelson, Johnny Paycheck, and Roger Miller cut their teeth. Franklin and Gill coincidentally both played on Willie Nelson’s tribute album, For the Good Times, released after Price’s passing in 2013.
In gathering songs for Sweet Memories, Gill wanted to avoid the same tracks that Willie had done in honoring the legend. So he decided to mine Price’s works for lesser-known gems. He even called into iconic Nashville radio station WSM and asked evening DJ Eddie Stubbs to help him find more obscure selections.
Gill: [Stubbs] had long been a Grand Ole Opry announcer and doing the 8 to midnight show on WSM, and I'd listen to it all the time. Whenever I was in the car, whenever I was traveling, I would listen. Because he was such a musicologist, he would play you obscure things. And he would say, "You may not know this one, but check this song out." I would call him up from time to time and say, "Hey man, play me something I hadn't heard before." And he could always stump me. I just started making a list of songs. And it was fun finding out where some of these songs came from, who wrote some of these songs.
C&I: It's a tribute to the people who wrote the songs, as well. You’ve got songs by Mel Tillis (“One More Time), Hank Cochran (“I’d Fight the World”), Hank Williams (“Weary Blues from Waitin’”), Marty Robbins (“The Same Two Lips”) … But Ray was such a stylist, like Paul said. Truly unique in his range. And you, Vince, obviously didn't want to copy what he did or do the exact same thing, because you're a stylist yourself. How did you want to honor him but retain your own style?
Gill: Well, I think that being a musician like I am, I know what the differences are. I know how he phrases and why he phrases that way. And I would borrow elements of the phrasing, but not the whole song. At times, I would lean on how he did certain things.
It's interesting in that where you sing affects where the band plays. It all has to be a conversation with each other. That's what music to me is, call and response. And if I play something that inspires you to play something, or I sing something, and the way I sing it makes him play things, and if I sing it shorter, he could play a little bit longer, and... All those things are great elements to great records. We borrowed, but neither one of us have ever been interested in doing a note-for-note sound-alike record. That doesn't really prove much of anything to anybody, to me.
C&I: That brings to mind a question for Paul: Do you always play steel guitar lines in response to Vince's vocal lines after you hear them? Is that the order of things?
Franklin: I think the steel guitar's job behind a vocalist is never to step on anything. I pay attention. If he's sustaining a note, I might let another beat go by. And the beauty of these songs is that there are huge spaces. You can let those things happen and let it breathe and all that. But it definitely is listening to the singer. That's the way I was taught as a kid early on, and this record gave me a chance to really let that go.
C&I: You guys are both so busy. Do you record this stuff together, or do you just send it back and forth for years?
Gill: Oh, we did everything together. We tracked everything together. And then I have the arduous job of trying to sing it to my liking and …
Franklin: … And did he ever …
Gill: … and play some guitar fills and a few solos and things like that. And we would get together periodically and mess with things. And that's what you do. That's what we spend our whole lives doing. To me, this whole process is really just trying to fill the space with the right thing.
And so that's all we do. We just follow each other around and say, "Hey, I like that. That'll make me do this different," and vice versa.
C&I: Are you going to tour with this record eventually?
Gill: I think that you'll see us. I know we've got a date on the Opry August 3, that'll coincide with the release of this record (Aug. 4). And we'll do two or three songs from the record then. I don't think we could go say, "Hey, let's go tour on the power of this record." Paul plays in my band when I play, and we tour together already. He's out playing with Chris Stapleton while I'm being a big-shot rockstar playing with the Eagles. And that's going to fill up my fall, so I won't get to do a whole lot with this.
C&I: You said you had about a list of 30 or so songs that you started with. Did you record a lot of them, or are we basically hearing what you recorded?
Gill: Pretty much. We missed a few. You always do. That's the neat part about making a record. You don't hit a home run every time you track a song. And we missed on a few things that I didn't think were up to par and to our liking. But I'd venture to say it was probably twice as many songs that we looked at to pick the 11. The original plan was we were going to do this tribute record, not only to Ray Price, but to Little Jimmy Dickens. We were going to do half-and-half like we did Bakersfield. And we found so many Ray songs that we were just crazy about. "Well heck, we can just do a whole Ray record." We may do a whole Jimmy record. We may do a George Jones record down the line, or Conway Twitty.
C&I: Are there certain eras or movements in country that you guys are taken with at the moment? I mean, I go back and forth. I'm always obsessed with something. Is there something right now that you guys are really getting into as a listener?
Franklin: We listen to a lot of different music all the time, staying up to the current situation. And so there are a lot of good young artists. There's this guy in Texas, Jake Worthington. It was fun to hear him, because it reminded me of Joe Diffie and Mark Chestnutt and that whole ‘90s thing. I'm excited to see where that goes. He's young enough to pull it off. But also I'll go back and listen to Tony Bennett. Diana Krall. Whatever she does next, I'm going to be there. I just love music.
Gill: I've been spending a lot of my time writing songs. With this break I'm on, I'm not going back out on the road until September. And I've been writing and writing and writing, and I'm having a ball. I'm writing with a lot of young people. I've been writing with people like Hardy, been writing with people like Tennille Townes, and I wrote a few songs with Wade Bowen the other day, and a young girl named Mae Estes, who's a great country singer from Arkansas. Just tons and tons and tons of people, and I'm having a ball doing it. Ashley McBride … I don't know how many. But that's what I'm doing. I'm loving and cheering on these kids just as much as I am the ones that have gone before us.
C&I: I feel the need to shout out Charlie Worsham as well. I saw him play with you, Vince, in Fort Worth a few years ago.
Gill: Yeah. Nobody better than that kid.
C&I: So, please don't tell me you're going to wait another 10 years to do another collection like this together …
Franklin: I don't know if I'll make it.
Gill: We might forget if we wait. It could be 10 years, because we'll forget to do another one. But no, we have fun doing these, and I think a lot of people might assume that we're doing these for our generation and maybe people older than us, but really, not so much. I think it's fun to try to teach a young kid about their history a little bit and say, "Hey, if you like the way I sing and I play, well, here's where I got a lot of it from."
Sweet Memories: The Music Of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys
(In stores August 4)
Track Listing:
1. “One More Time”
Written by Mel Tillis
2. “I’d Fight The World”
Written by Hank Cochran and Joe Allison
3. “You Wouldn’t Know Love”
Written by Hank Cochran and Dave Kirby
4. “Walkin’ Slow (And Thinking ‘Bout Her)”
Written by Bobby Bare and L Guynes
5. “The Same Two Lips”
Written by Marty Robbins
6. “Weary Blues from Waitin’”
Written by Hank Williams Sr.
7. “Kissing Your Picture (Is So Cold)”
Written by Mel Tillis, Ray Price and Wayne Walker
8. “Sweet Memories”
Written by Mickey Newbury
9. “Danny Boy”
Written by Frederick E. Weatherly
10. “Your Old Love Letters”
Written by Ray Price
11. “Healing Hands Of Time”
Written by Willie Nelson
