Ray Price, Groundbreaking, Hit-Making Country Singer, Dies at 87
Ray Price, who has died aged 87, was one of the most successful Country singers in Nashville’s history, with a career lasting from 1949 until earlier this year; among his hits was the oft-covered song Release Me.
His hits forced record labels which had serially rejected him to follow his musical lead, and helped launch the likes of Willie Nelson, Roger Miller and Johnny Paycheck (all of whom played in Price’s band before finding solo success).
Ray Noble Price was born on January 12 1926 on a farm near Perryville, Cherokee County, Texas. His parents divorced when he was three, his mother moving to Dallas where she became a successful clothes designer. Price would later claim that his ability to appeal to both Country and pop audiences stemmed from growing up both on a farm with his father and in the Dallas suburbs with his mother.
He began singing and playing guitar as a teenager. Then, in 1942, while studying Veterinary Medicine, he was drafted into the Marines. He returned to his studies after demob, but by 1949 had cast aside his books to embark on a career in music, joining the Big D Jamboree in Dallas.
He soon realized that to succeed in Country music he needed to base himself in Nashville. There he briefly roomed with Hank Williams, often filling in for him when he was too drunk to perform. But Price himself was far from successful, and no record label appeared interested in signing him. He auditioned and was rejected by more than a dozen before finally being signed by Columbia, whose boss Don Law had been deliberately misled to believe that Decca were on the point of signing Price.
Price quickly became one of the most successful country singers ever: between 1954 and 1974 he amassed a total of 64 US Country chart hits, only 11 of which failed to make the Top 20; 13 also crossed over to the pop charts. In 1954 he had a first big hit with Release Me, a song many others would successfully record – including Engelbert Humperdinck, who took it to No 1 in Britain in 1967.
In 1956 Price would score the biggest hit of his career with Crazy Arms, a ballad based on a Texas shuffle beat that topped the Country charts for 20 consecutive weeks. So predominant did the shuffle become in late-1950s Country music that producers and dancers would talk about a particular rhythm as “the Ray Price beat”.
During the 1950s and early 1960s Price mostly played the sparse, honky-tonk Country style that Hank Williams had popularised. But by 1967 — tiring of playing to bar audiences more interested in fighting than listening, and aware that Country had an increasing suburban audience — he radically changed his sound. He added a string section to his band, discarded his cowboy suits and concentrated on crooning lush ballads.
This paid off spectacularly in 1970 when he recorded For The Good Times, a ballad written by the then almost unknown Kris Kristofferson, which proved another Country No 1 and was also a hit in the pop charts. While lovers of traditional Country music vilified Price for “going pop”, he found that by softening his sound he began to win over a huge new audience.
Price had a fine voice and a good understanding of what songs appealed to blue-collar white Americans. Yet though he rarely strayed from the themes of heartbreak and infidelity (his own marriage ended in divorce in 1970), he found that his change in style came at a cost. Frozen out by Nashville’s power brokers, he moved back to Texas, buying a 200-acre ranch in Mt Pleasant, not far from where he grew up. “People ask me how far I’ve gone in life,” he said. “About 20 miles.”
He did eventually return to Nashville to record, in 1980 calling in a favour from his former bassist Willie Nelson to make the duet album San Antonio Rose. This gave Price a No 3 with Faded Love – his last really big hit. Yet even when the chart-toppers dried up he kept recording, releasing Christmas albums and gospel and duet albums, and re-recordings of old hits. At the same time he maintained a theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he performed several times daily to coach loads of pensioners who had once danced to his hits. In 1999 he came to national attention for the first time in decades when he was arrested for possessing marijuana.
Remarkably, however, as the new century got under way he began issuing strong new albums on which he sang with great beauty. In 2007 the Nashville label Lost Highway put him in the studio with Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard for Last Of The Breed, a well-received double-album that found the three veterans (and a few famous guests) sharing vocals on Country standards. Price had always loved the limelight, and with Last Of The Breed, for which he won a Grammy in 2008, he was able to enjoy it one last time.
He is survived by his second wife, Jeannie, and a son.
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