Vince Gill & Paul Franklin Honor Ray Price On ‘Sweet Memories’ Album [Interview]

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Paul Franklin and Vince Gill

10 years after the two musicians came together to release Bakersfield, their tribute album to heroes Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and their bands, multi-talented singer-songwriter Vince Gill and lauded steel guitar wizard Paul Franklin have come back together to honor another musical giant and his band, Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys.

Price, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, was an essential figure in country music in the 1950s and ’60s. He impacted the genre with hits such as “Crazy Arms,” “City Lights,” “Heartaches by the Number,” “I Won’t Mention It Again” and “For the Good Times.”

Six years following Price’s death in 2013, Gill and Franklin began recording tracks for the album. Both of them had recorded with the legend before. In 2002, Gill sang harmony on “What If We Say Goodbye” for Price’s album, Time, as well as on “Heartaches By the Number” for 2007’s Last of the Breed. Gill and Franklin both worked on Price’s Beauty Is: The Final Sessions in 2013. Franklin also recorded with Barbara Mandrell when Price joined her in 1990 for a version of “Crazy Arms.”

“He was a real gentleman,” Franklin tells MusicRow. “We both got to play on his last record. He was having his health issues, but he was so courteous. He was such a nice man.”

Gill says, “It’s rare for someone to keep their voice until the end of their life. He was still singing like Ray Price until the end. It was magical.”

Gill points out that Price had a unique gift for phrasing in his vocal delivery, which is one of many of Price’s attributes that have inspired the Hall of Fame singer. “He sang like no one else. That’s what people yearn for these days, to hear a singer and know who it is right away,” he shares.

For the track list, Gill and Franklin wanted to expand their material deeper than Price’s hits to reimagine. In fact, Sweet Memories includes some songs that the two heard for the first time in the searching process. They had help from one of country music’s most vibrant minds, former Grand Ole Opry announcer, WSM disc jockey and music scholar Eddie Stubbs.

“We landed on the possibility of not doing the obvious choices,” Gill says. “People may ask why we didn’t do certain songs, but it was because they’ve been done. Why wouldn’t you dig a little deeper?”

“Eddie has one of the deepest wells in town. He kept bringing songs, I learned so much about Ray Price,” Franklin says.

With Stubbs informing the tune selection, Gill and Franklin reimagined Price’s “One More Time” (originally recorded in 1960), “I’d Fight the World” (1966), “You Wouldn’t Know Love” (1970), “Walkin’ Slow (And Thinking ‘Bout Her)” (1962), “The Same Two Lips” (1967), “Weary Blues from Waitin’” (1951), “Kissing Your Picture (Is So Cold)” (1958), “Sweet Memories” (1971), “Danny Boy” (1967), “Your Old Love Letters” (1965) and “Healing Hands of Time” (1966).

In addition to bringing lesser-known Price songs out of the history books, it was special to the men that they were able to highlight the work of such songwriters as Hank Williams, Mel Tillis, Hank Cochran, Joe Allison, Dave Kirby, Bobby Bare, Marty Robbins, Wayne Walker, Mickey Newbury, Willie Nelson, Lance Guynes, Fred Weatherly and Price, himself.

“Back then, you might release three albums in a year because they basically sold their product from the stage. So you had young Roger Miller, Mel Tillis, Willie Nelson, Harlan Howard, Hank Cochran and all these iconic writers writing so many songs,” Franklin says. “In that whole library of his discography, therein lies incredible songwriting.”

When it came to the recording of the project, it was important that the men did not do sound-alike records, which is something Gill learned when making a record with Rodney Crowell. The two were covering Buck Owens‘ “Above And Beyond,” and stuck close to the original recording.

“Buck heard it and said, ‘You didn’t change one note.’ We did it pretty verbatim. They’re both worthy, but what are you going to prove doing a note-for-note adaptation of something somebody’s already done?

“I don’t sound like Ray Price,” he adds. “I can emulate him, and I did in small doses. I think that’s just right, to take the spirit of it but don’t overkill it.”

Gill points out that something that he learned from making this record is Price’s mastery of editing himself.

“He was so patient and reserved as a singer. Even though he could go up and bust that high note, he didn’t do it nine times in the song—he did it once. He was patient,” Gill says. “As a young musician, I learned a valuable lesson. I played a solo on something and [the engineer] said, ‘That was nice. Now play me half of what you know.’

“That’s what everybody who is worth their weight do: they edit themselves. You gather yourself with musicians that know what not to do. Everybody gets to have that freedom to be sparse and patient,” Gill says. “Ray was not in a hurry to show you how great he could sing.”

Ultimately, Gill and Franklin hope that their selections of Price’s extensive catalog shines a lot on the vibrancy of country music in the ’50s and ’60s.

“If a young musician hears Vince or me on a record and love it, hopefully they dig in deeper and they’ll hear us talking about all these greats,” Franklin says.

“The beautiful thing about our musical history is that you can keep tracing it back further and further. Country music has been recorded now for close to 100 years, and it’s evolved quite a bit,” Gill shares. “It’s healthy that it changes. If it was the same thing over and over, it would wear thin.”

Click here to listen to Gill and Franklin’s Sweet Memories: The Music of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys.

LB Cantrell
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