Ray Price died on December 16, 2013, at his ranch outside Mount Pleasant, Texas. He was 87. A few days later, hundreds of people gathered to remember the man whose smooth voice and “Ray Price shuffle” had shaped country music for more than half a century.
Willie Nelson was not at the microphone that day. Instead, longtime Fort Worth radio personality Bill Mack stood up and read a statement Willie had written for his old friend. One line summed it up:
“Without a Ray Price, there wouldn’t have been a Willie Nelson.”
Then the note turned to how it all started, and the room got a laugh.
“Can You Play Bass?”
In 1960, Willie Nelson moved to Nashville as a struggling songwriter. Around 1961, Ray Price needed someone to fill a spot in his band, the Cherokee Cowboys, after Johnny Paycheck quit. Ray asked Willie a simple question: could he play bass?
Willie said yes. As Bill Mack finished reading the story at the memorial, Ray soon found out that Willie could not play bass.
Willie’s stint in the band did not last long, but it changed his life. Ray Price recorded Willie’s song “Night Life” and made it one of his signature tunes in the early 1960s. For a young writer who had once sold rights to that very song for next to nothing, having Ray Price sing it was a door swinging open.
The Rooster
By the mid-1960s, Willie Nelson had bought a small farm in Ridgetop, outside Nashville, and was trying his hand as a gentleman farmer. That is where the most famous feud of their friendship began.
Ray Price was proud of a prize rooster. The way the story is usually told, the bird kept going after Willie’s hens. Willie solved the problem the country way. He shot it.
Ray was not amused. According to a 2007 account from Ray’s own launch event for Last of the Breed, Ray refused to record Willie’s songs for a long stretch afterward. Versions of the story differ on the smaller details, but every telling agrees on the ending: the rooster lost, and the friendship went quiet for years.
Making Up the Texas Way
Time healed what the rooster had broken. By 1980, the roles had reversed. Ray Price’s chart run had cooled, while Willie Nelson was the biggest star in country music, appearing in films like The Electric Horseman and Honeysuckle Rose.
Willie used that spotlight to bring his old boss back in. The two recorded San Antonio Rose, an album rooted in Bob Wills and western swing. Their duet of “Faded Love,” with Crystal Gayle singing harmony on the chorus, reached No. 3 on the Billboard country chart in October 1980. It was Ray’s first Top 10 hit in more than five years, and his biggest in seven.
That was only the beginning of round two. In 2003 they released Run That By Me One More Time, their first duet album in 23 years, which earned a Grammy nomination. In 2007 they joined Merle Haggard for Last of the Breed, and their duet “Lost Highway” won a Grammy in 2008. Willie also made a habit of inviting Ray to his Fourth of July Picnics.
The jokes never stopped either. When Ray Price ran into a little legal trouble of his own in the 2000s, Willie, no stranger to that kind of headline, reportedly called him right away to say he had just earned $5 million in free publicity.
Ray summed up their bond in a Rolling Stone interview near the end of his life:
“We’re sort of like brothers in a way, we always help each other out when we can.”
For the Good Times
A month before he died, Ray Price finished one last album, Beauty Is, with producer Fred Foster. It included his version of a Willie Nelson song called “It Always Will Be.” Foster said Ray told him he did not care what else they recorded, he wanted to do that one.
In September 2016, Willie Nelson returned the favor. He reunited Fred Foster and the same team at the same Nashville studio and released For the Good Times: A Tribute to Ray Price, twelve songs his friend had made famous, including “Night Life,” “Faded Love” and “It Always Will Be.”
Willie said there was never any doubt he would make that album. When people ask about his favorite singers, he tells them there is Ray Price and Frank Sinatra. And he described his old boss the simplest way he could: Ray was as close a friend as you could have.
Not bad for a bass player who could not play bass, and a friendship that once came down to one unlucky rooster.
Do you remember hearing “Faded Love” by Willie and Ray on the radio in 1980? Share your memories in the comments.