Vince Gill and Paul Franklin Talk Ray Price Tribute Album

Vince Gill and steel guitar player Paul Franklin are continuing their tradition of honoring the past with their new Ray Price tribute album, Sweet Memories: The Music of Ray Price & The Cherokee Cowboys. The longtime collaborators are connecting their voices to the past, similar to what they did honoring the music of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens on Bakersfield in 2013.

In a conversation with American Songwriter, Gill and Franklin talk about their love for music from the past, how the album highlights their musicianship and much more.

American Songwriter (AS): I find it interesting that you did Bakersfield exploring Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and now you’ve got this Ray Price project. What is this fascination with the music of the past?

Paul Franklin (PF): We just want to play it [laughs]. One reason we just sit down and play and then use the concept. We wanted to salute Ray Price and George Jones and Jimmy Dickens. We talked about all of them, and we just started with Ray Price and kept on getting more songs and [going], ‘This is great.’ We had a ball doing it. And then it became a record.

Vince Gill (VG): It’s fun because it speaks to the musician in both of us. I’m singing these songs, and it’s fun to sing these songs and sometimes daunting. When you take on the classics and the greats, there’s obviously going to be the immediate comparison, which is not the reason you’ve done it. But my way of doing it’s not bad, but it’s cool, it’s a little bit different. So that’s all you’re trying to do. I want to do these things with [Franklin] because I love the way he plays. I’ve worked on maybe 1,000 artists’ records in my career singing and playing. I’ve sung with plenty of people, but this really speaks to the musician in me more than anything else.

In so many of those old records, the musicians never got the opportunity to really show out. Records had to be under two minutes long to get on the radio, and so this was a way that musicians could stretch out a little bit and what might happen had you given [steel guitar player] Buddy Emmons two solos in a row to play, he might have blown your frickin’ mind if you’d given him a chance to. He never got the opportunity to, and so that’s what it is.

[RELATED: Vince Gill and Paul Franklin Open up About Recording “Danny Boy”]

AS: How did you go about selecting the songs? I think you hit on an interesting point about the emotion of the song coming through the musicians and the music. Talk about that process and how that comes through the songs.

VG: I much preferred the Ray Price era of the earliest days. You think about the songwriters that are represented on this record, you got Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Hank Cochran, Mel Tillis, Bobby Bare. One of the songs we did was called [‘Weary Blues From Waitin’] which was a Hank Williams song. I’d never heard Ray sing it and I stumbled into a lot of these songs that I never knew Ray had done versions of. We didn’t want to do the obvious, we didn’t want to do the biggest hits of his career and just tackle that. I’ve played this record for a lot of great students of Ray Price and stumped them on several things that I had no idea he ever recorded and I found that out to be true myself. And so we picked songs that would showcase the musicianship every bit as much as we tried to pick the best songs, our favorite songs that we liked, but also give each of us a chance to shine as musicians as well.

AS: Paul, you talked about hearing the steel guitar growing up and your dad pointing out the emotion of songs. Take me inside that process for you as a musician and exploring the emotions.

PF: For me, we all have that sentiment, when we go back to our hometowns. This music for me went back to…I started playing when I was eight, so it went back to what I learned to play by listening to the radio. The songs I heard on the radio were Ray Price, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens. So I’m sitting in modern times, and no offense against all the new music, which I love. But it’s the chance to go back into that candy store, ‘I want to sample this and I remember this,’ and bring all the various elements that I learned. I’ve got my modern-day influences, and [Gill] will play something on guitar. We do this not only singing thing, but we play and mess around before we even cut the song. It’s a call and response, a lot of it is between all the musicians.

VG: I hear a lot of people when they hear this record say, ‘I never get to hear Paul play like this.’ I say, ‘It’s because he’s not given the chance to.’ That well is deep, the well of knowledge of the history of the instrument, and that’s what I love, the freedom to explore and play. With creativity, if everybody’s willing to not worry about where a great idea comes from, there is no end to what is possible. And that’s the beautiful thing about musicians like Paul is they don’t let their egos get in the way.

PF: One thing that we do that we agree on is neither one of us want to replicate. We create within the emotion of a Don Rich or a Buddy Emmons or a Pete Wade or whoever. But we want to bring our own voice to that.

VG: There’s nothing more uninteresting to me than a note-for-note adaptation of somebody else’s record. Find your own way to play that song, find your own way to sing that song. I’m singing the songs and you got to understand Ray Price was a one-of-a-kind phraser of the way he sang songs, and it’s not like I do. So I have to be a wise enough student to borrow elements of it but not ape it from note for note and all that. So it’s a great exercise in me getting to learn. As long as you can lean into the spirit of something without it being exactly like something, then it has a chance to be way more interesting.

AS: How do you hope this album impacts the people who hear it?

PF: It bridges. I hope [young musicians] love what we do, but if it inspires someone, a singer or somebody going, ‘I never heard that.’ There are a lot of people that may not have heard ‘Danny Boy,’ and they hear [Gill’s] phrasing on ‘Danny Boy,’ if that draws somebody in and go, ‘I’m gonna take a closer look’ and go back a decade earlier than what they thought was cool. I did the same thing. I moved to Nashville in ’72 and it was all you could do to get me to listen to stuff in the ’60s. I was all into, ‘Where is this town going?’ So if this helps somebody to look a little farther back, if we can do that, then I think that’d be a wonderful gift.

VG: It would also be equally as powerful if it moved it forward. Nobody thinks about that. They only think, ‘It’s all retro.’ But no, this could be a way that people choose to move forward and if enough people love it, then maybe they’d be more drawn to it. Country music’s history has often run from its definition sometimes in that you listen to it and say, ‘This feels like 1958.’ I think you listen to it and say, ‘It’s kind of influenced by it, but it sounds as fresh and as original.’ Anybody can make a record note for note. But if you make something original that has history in the process, I think that’s a pretty good combination.

Photo Credit: John Shearer/Courtesy of MCA Nashville