PLAYING THE PRICE: An Interview With Vince Gill and Paul Franklin

BY GARRETT CASH
HONKY TONK TIMES CONTRIBUTOR
ISSUE 22, October 2023

What happens when you put together a Country music superstar with argu­ably the greatest pedal steel player of the last few decades for a duet album? The world got the answer to that when Vince Gill and Paul Franklin released their Bakersfield album ten years ago in 2013. Now the magic has happened again in their new collab­orative effort Sweet Memories: The Music Of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys. In this interview with Honky Tonk Times contributor Garrett Cash, they discuss their history of collabora­tion, the challenges of song selection, and the importance of putting their own stamp on the songs. They discuss Price’s influence on Country music, his ability to maintain traditional elements during the Rock and Roll era, and his transition to a more cos­mopolitan sound. Gill and Franklin both share their personal experiences with Price’s legacy and how they hope his music continues to reach the new generation.

Sweet Memories: The Music Of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys is out now through MCA Nashville.

Garrett: When did you two first be­gin to collaborate? The earliest credit I could find was Paul’s work on When I Call Your Name in 1989.

Paul Franklin: Yes! Specifically, I re­member it was at Knott’s Berry Farm. Vince was visiting a fiddle player that was in Mel Tillis’ band, Jim Buchan­an. They had done a project togeth­er, and we ended up meeting and I loved him, man! We sort of got off to ourselves with the Statesiders [Mel Tillis’ backing band], and we shared a bunch of listening and talking and next thing I knew Vince moved to Nashville.

Vince Gill: I had made a few treks to Nashville doing session work with other people. Paul was playing some­where and we’d sit down to have a jam. We had a friendship going back to about 1981 or ‘82. I made quite a few demos in the ‘80s, and Paul played on some of those and we al­ways hit it off. He played the amazing solo on “When I Call Your Name,” which is so iconic now. It was fun! I came up with this idea about doing a duet record thing, but I didn’t want to do it with a singer. I want to do it with a musician. I’ve always been a great lover of steel guitar.

Paul: I was going to tell you a funny story about that. I remember we had finished the Time Jumpers gig at the Station Inn and you said, “you got a second to hang back?” So we waited till everybody left and we’re out the back and you mentioned this duet album idea and I said, “you know I’ll just play on your record, right? You can do this solo like usual.” But he had this vision, and so it was really his vision that started it.

Vince: The beauty of the thought be­hind doing some of this is my mind­set that I’m really doing this as a mu­sician, not as a singer. There were so many great musicians that played with Buck Owens. There were so many great musicians that played with Mer­le Haggard and the same with Ray Price, and, and all these things really are coming more from us wanting to pay tribute to those players. Plus, it worked out well that I could sing the songs [laughs]. I think instrumental records were not really in the cards. It made sense and I think we’ll do a few more over the next few years. We’ve always thought about Little Jimmy Dickens, George Jones, and Conway Twitty. There’s a connection between all of us and all of them in a way that makes sense to do this. So it’s been an opportunity to do what we love.

Garrett: Well I’ll put in a vote for the Conway Twitty album, that’s my man!

Paul: Mine too!

Garrett: Vince, you’ve said part of the idea behind Bakersfield was to imag­ine what they would have sounded like if the musicians back in the ‘60s had more time on the recording to stretch out and perform more than simple turnarounds and solos. They had to keep arrangements tight to stay under three minutes for radio, whereas now you have the freedom to explore these songs. Was that a driv­ing force for this album as well?

Vince: I do and the brilliance with what they did just doing the turn­around or just doing an intro was so stupendously great. My mind goes to “what if that musician were given the opportunity to really have a voice that played an entire verse or played the entire chorus?” That way you could have a beginning, a middle, and an end to the solo and it would be beautiful.

Garrett: The impetus of this collab­oration seems to be playing the type of throwback Country in The Time Jumpers, and then the exploration of Californian Country in your first co-billed effort Bakersfield. You also both collaborated on Willie Nelson’s Ray Price tribute album back in 2016 along with the rest of the Time Jump­ers. Were the gears moving towards doing a Ray Price album yourselves from that experience?

Paul: That was an honor to get to do that project, but that was more Wil­lie’s. It was intended to emulate and capture the sound of the older records. But I think our album Bakersfield was more of the inspiration because we had such a great time and then we realized that all this music needs to get documented again for a new gen­eration. We really just wanted to play this music more than anything!

Vince: It came more from missing the music more than anything else. We obviously get to play it on our Mon­day night Time Jumpers gig, and we play just a few of these kinds of songs at a sound check. But to be given the chance to buckle down and go do an interpretation of something you love is more from a creative place. You never grow tired of being in an opportunity where you can be cre­ative and take something you love somewhere where it’s never been before. We’re not trying to sing and play these songs verbatim. We’re just trying to play them like we do! Not because we think we’re better or any different. We just love them and we’re trying to approach this from a rever­ent place. If you simply make a copy of a record, that doesn’t show much creativity. If you can honor it and kind of keep it within itself and then put your own stamp on it, I think it gets to stand alone.

Paul: If Country music has a Bible of songs it draws from, then I would say these kinds of songs we’re trying to tackle are those songs. The writers who wrote these songs are the bed­rock writers for what we do. Here we are taking a bunch of songs written by Mel Tillis, Roger Miller, Marty Robbins, etc. and we didn’t even real­ize that by choosing songs from Ray’s catalog, we were really signing on to do songs written by these legends. They wrote such great vehicles to play. The melodies are so easy to play and it just lends itself to what we love and want to do.

Garrett: On the album you tackle material from the beginning of Price’s career when he sounded like Hank Williams (“Weary Blues”) through to the hits of his more orchestrated Country-Pop period like “Danny Boy.” Was it a challenge to cover that wide a range of material?

Vince: I think with “Weary Blues,” the conscious thought of it for me was that it’s a tie between him and Hank. I think they were roommates for a while, at some point early in Ray’s life and I think “Weary Blues” might have been the first thing he cut [“Weary Blues” was Price’s breakout on Co­lumbia in 1951. Price roomed with Williams in the last year of Williams’ life]. We kind of took it in a much different direction than the original by having some harmony on it. It’s very different from Hank’s version or Ray’s version, so again it kind of stands on its own.

Sometimes the spirit behind some­thing is the relationship that someone has with someone else, and “Danny Boy” was when I was a little cautious about even thinking about doing that. It was such an iconic song. So many people have done it, and I don’t know who you would say has done the de­finitive version of “Danny Boy.”

I don’t think you could make that case for anybody because so many people have done it and my mindset behind that was trying to find a way to do the song right for me. For instance, every­one has done “Night Life” for all these years. It’s a great song but it’s really a showcase for the steel guitar player. That was kind of first and foremost in our minds was: “what song should we pick that will really suit what you do and what I do?”

It’s probably not as guitar driven a record as Bakersfield was, but maybe a little bit more of a singer record for me. All of it is just trying to figure out the coolest and smartest thing to try to do. We did obscure songs, and a lot of these songs I never knew Ray had done a version of. I never knew he did a version of “Sweet Memories.” I didn’t know about “Weary Blues” until I found it for this project. So it’s not a record full of the obvious choic­es or his biggest hits. I think then even an aficionado of Ray Price will say: “Oh, I didn’t know he did that either!” Hopefully you get a chance to find maybe an undiscovered song or two on this project.

Garrett: There were a couple on there I couldn’t even find on streaming; now that’s some deep catalog materi­al! I loved “Walkin’ Slow,” which I had never heard before and was released as a single in 1961.

Vince: Yeah! I was surprised to find out that Bobby Bare was one of the co-writers on that one. He had his hands in cool stuff then.

Garrett: When you were choosing the songs, was there an agenda in mind in terms of highlighting certain parts of Ray’s career that hadn’t been as celebrated before? I noticed for instance you tackled more songs from his mid-’60s period (where his band was led by Buddy Emmons) than one would expect.

Paul: We were trying to really cover the earliest part of his career and we were originally going to do half Ray Price and half somebody else. What we discovered in finding these songs is that Ray has been a focus point in Country music.

He shifted his sound later on. He started with the hard driving shuffles, but then he went into the smooth sound of “You Don’t Know Love” and “For The Good Times.”

We realized that if you’re going to do a tribute to Ray, you have to cover more styles. Eddie Stubbs was a great help with this. He was finding ob­scure songs as deep as he could find, and we just listened and, and found the songs we love. I don’t think we were trying to do anything but bring in the spirit of what we captured in Bakersfield. There’s some Ralph Mooney in there even though Ray never used Ralph. Because nobody knows the songs here we felt they were obscure enough that you could tie the two albums together.

Vince: I think that would be true of “One More Time.” That probably sounds a little bit more like the segue from Bakersfield to Ray Price. It’s a lit­tle more in that Bakersfield Country spirit maybe than Ray’s version, but still you can’t go wrong with a shuffle and guitar solo to split with Paul.

Garrett: People don’t mention this much, but I would consider Ray to be aligned with the Bakersfield artists of the ‘50s in the sense that he was hold­ing his ground during the Rock and Roll onslaught of the time. While other Country artists were struggling to assimilate in the new Rock regime, Ray and the Bakersfield scene were the face of the hardcore Honky Tonk contingent.

Vince: You just made me think of how interesting it was that Rock and Roll almost killed Country music in the ‘50s. It really put a big dent in the popularity of Country music in a way. Artists like Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold all went crooner early on way before Ray did. Ray stuck with the hardcore Honky Tonk and shuffling and twin fiddles and all that. Then he found his way much later being that broad voice singer and having the string-laden songs and a little more cosmopolitan. It’s interesting that he came around to doing that much later in his career than some of the others that were trying to emulate Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett.

Garrett: I think people who were only familiar with Ray’s later hits like “For The Good Times” would be surprised to hear these early Honky Tonk songs because it truly sounds like a different artist. This is a man who had Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, and Johnny Bush in his band before they were famous. It was a real Texan thing.

Vince: We went to the Academy of Country Music Awards one year. I don’t know how many years ago, 15 or 20 years ago, whatever it was. My good fortune was to get to sit next to Ray at the awards. We sat down and got acquainted and I leaned over and said: “Hey Ray, I bet you $500 they don’t play one shuffle tonight.” He doubled over and laughed hard. He said, “Son, I don’t believe I’ll take that bet.” And I don’t believe he did!

Garrett: What was your impression of Ray before you met or worked with him, and what was your impression after?

Paul: The first time I heard Ray Price was in Detroit where I’m from. That’s also where a buddy was from Indiana, but he moved to Detroit as a teenager to work for Casey Clark [Clark was the emcee of a Detroit-based coun­try radio program called “The Lazy Ranch Boys Barn Dance” on station WXYZ]. So I knew about Buddy Emmons coming to town with Ray Price. But there was this big Country music show at Cobo Hall, so it’s also the same night I heard Buck Owens for the first time. Connie Smith was on the show too. It was like an Opry show in a big arena. I saw Ray Price there and he actually featured Buddy Emmons in the middle of the show. He said “We’re gonna feature Buddy Emmons and his stereo steel guitar!” I was about eleven or twelve, at that age I had just been playing steel for a few years. I remember specifically Buck Owens and Ray Price from that night because of the steel guitar playing and the musicianship. Ray and his band had beautiful Nudie suits. They were just like Buck Owens. They were ready to go! It was so impressive. Later on I got to record a version of “Crazy Arms” that was a duet be­tween him and Barbara Mandrell. I was sad that he didn’t show up, but I did my part and his voice was over­dubbed. Then Vince and I both got to record with him. Vince probably did several times, but I got to play on his last album. He was a gentleman throughout his career, class all the way.

Vince: I was taken with the way he phrased a song. To me that’s where the separation lies between a good singer and a great singer. The great singer has a way of phrasing that is interesting. Ray Charles and Willie Nelson would be examples of this. Ray Price was of course, but you know who was a great phraser of Country music was Jerry Lee Lewis!

Paul: Yeah!

Garrett: When are you guys going to do the Jerry Lee tribute album? Paul, all you have to do is play pedal steel like Jerry Lee played piano.

Paul: I wish I could — I don’t have enough lighter fluid!

Garrett: Vince, did you feel that you were pushed in new ways as a vocalist on this album? I would assume sing­ing songs that Ray Price got to first would be intimidating.

Vince: I think that the important thing to do in a performance is give just a small taste of the original at times to let everybody know that I did listen to how he sang this song and I’m not gonna try to sing it exactly like him. I sing the way I sing too, and it’s not that it’s better or worse or anything like that. It was a great study to see how he worked. I’m enough of a musician to know why and how he did it.

Being a singer or a jazz singer or what have you, you have to be aware that it’s not that interesting when someone is just a beat singer. They just sing on the beat. You have to have a unique patience to understand why someone would do what they do.

What you fail to realize sometimes because we all do this, is we play music in a way where we’re primar­ily responding to the singer. It’s our job. I say that and every time I play around the singer I do the same thing. Sometimes when I’m the singer, I play around the musicians too and I’m listening to them just as much as they’re listening to me. When every­body does that it’s kind of cool. You can practice something a certain way on the tracking date and then go do something different from that. So a lot of what the musicians play won’t quite fit. It won’t match up and won’t feel the same. It’s the art of giving each other the respect and space that they deserve.

Paul: It’s just a common response when doing anything at the level that Vince sings at, or Ray and all the greats like Willie Nelson, is that you want it to sound spontaneous every night. You can remember everything you did, but should you always do it exactly the same? When we were recording these songs, we were all listening to Vince and he was listen­ing to us. There wasn’t any talking. It wasn’t like: “Hey, you do this.” It was mostly performances. What you’re hearing is a conversation between the band and Vince.

Vince: It’s a natural instinct.

Garrett: What do you think Price’s legacy is in the world of Country music today, and how do you hope this album might add to that conver­sation?

Vince: I feel like the impact has al­ready been made on me and Paul just getting to do the record. You know, the interesting thing about making a record is once you’ve done it and you turn it loose, you have to let it go. You have no control over how it’s gonna get to where it’s gonna get or who it’s gonna get to. You’re always hopeful, but you don’t have a real concrete expectation of what that is.

When we did Bakersfield, the gift of all gifts was that Merle Haggard got to hear it. Plus he wrote the liner notes. If that happened, then I was satisfied. I think it’s pretty much a given that the people that revere and love this kind of music in our gener­ation and older are gonna like this. It will be right up their alley.

But the beautiful thing is that there may be a 20-year-old kid somewhere playing guitar and he’ll hear this and go, “Wow. What is this, and where is this going to take me?” That’s where something generational can happen.

Garrett: You can count one right here, I’m 26 and I love the record!

Paul: Our job is done!