Ray Price, Guich Koock
So what do you ask a legend?
If you could interview country music superstar Ray Price, what would you say?
This gave me considerable pause when Gene Wolf of Sharity Productions arranged a phone interview in anticipation of Price’s Christmas concert at Cailloux Theater in Kerrville on Sunday, November 25.
After all, what question can you ask that he hasn’t answered a hundred times?
Turns out, you don’t have to ask him anything. You just visit with him.
When Ray Price came on the phone, it felt as if I was sitting at a small table in a small bar in a small town, and Mr. Price just happened to walk in.
That small-town tavern in my mind was real. It was the place where I was introduced to Ray Price through his music. When I was 19 years old, I played with Frankie Lee and the Swingmasters. Frankie Lee’s “go to” singer was Ray Price. I didn’t realize that during those cold, cold Saturday nights in Iowa I was playing a future catalog of country classic: Cold, Cold Heart; For the Good Times; Release Me; Crazy Arms; City Lights; and on and on.
When I finally got to talk to Price in person, I learned about the man behind those songs.
I asked how his singing voice at age 86 stays so clean and sincere. “I honestly think I sing better than ever,” he said with a laugh. “I might be fooling myself, but I have learned different things through the years about my voice. I have always studied my voice. It’s my instrument. I guess I was born with it. By age 5 or 6, I sang all the time on the farm. It was just a natural thing.”
I learned that while he always wanted to be a singer, he actually started off studying to be a veterinarian. His music career was practically an accident.
“For kicks I would get up to sing in an East Dallas cafe,” he recalled of his college years. “They would get people out of the audience to sing. I liked it, and would go out there.”
One day a guitar player asked Price to come with him to sing a couple of his songs for a music publisher. “I thought, well, I’ll go ahead. There’s nothing wrong with helping somebody out.”
During a break in the recording at the radio station, Price sang a couple of songs. They stopped him and asked if he could come back the next day. Price said, sure. The next day the owner of a Nashville record label signed him to a contract. “That’s when I discovered what I really like to do,” Price said with a chuckle. So long, vet school.
I learned that at age 86, Ray Price is having the time of his life.
“I’m enjoying it more than I did before,” he said. “Now that I can succeed in doing what I want to with my voice. Until I lose my vocal chords, I’m going to continue doing it.”
That’s probably not an issue. Because, while he has “a lot of older fans,” younger fans are discovering him. I know this first hand, because when I took my 15-year-old daughter to his spring concert, I expected her to be indifferent. Instead, she told me, “I really love that guy. I didn’t realize I would recognize all those songs.” She became a fan.
“Well, there are not hordes of them,” he said of his followers under age 30, “but they are coming more and more all the time. I like to think it’s because our music is just good music. It’s not like other music that claims it is country music. I think more needs to be done to expose the world to better classes of music than bunches of people screaming and jumping up and down.” He paused, then added, “Though I guess that would be all right if you were standing on a fire.”
NEXT WEEK: Shuffles and strings: Two more things I learned from my visit with Ray Price.