Night Life - Ray Price

This is the second day in a row that we’ve had an album from someone named Price, and if yesterday’s Alan Price LP offered an interesting glimpse into the concerns of the British everyman in the early 70’s, this country gem from Ray Price gives us an equally revealing view of the end of the honky tonk era in America in the early 60’s. This is a profoundly intimate country album, and it almost seems to take on a life of its own as it wistfully evokes the end of the era brought about by Hank Williams, with whom Price briefly shared a room in the early 50’s. But it seems pointless to bemoan the death of honky tonk when Night Life foreshadows so much incredible music to come. Night Life is one of country’s first concept albums, and even if Marty Robbins made a more fully-realized concept album a few years earlier with Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, Price’s set of odes to loneliness, lost love, and, sure ‘nuff, the night life itself, is a much more timeless set of tunes. The title track alone is, pardon my excessive enthusiasm, one of the all-time greatest American songs ever written, period. At the juncture of country and jazz (which would be further explored throughout the 60’s and eventually turned into the crystalline twangy pop of the Nashville “countrypolitan” sound), “Night Life” is a beauteous tribute to those shadowy characters that inhabited the musical underworld of the pre-outlaw generation South. Featuring some of the most heartbreaking pedal steel ever put to wax (courtesy of the god-like Buddy Emmons), it was written by Willie Nelson years before his pot-smokin’ hillbilly image would make him a superstar. The rest of the album is almost as stellar, as Price’s semi-legendary backing group, the Cherokee Cowboys, pretty much invent the “Nashville sound” that would characterize country music in the 60’s. This album was not a success for Price upon its initial release. Yet time has been kind to it, and it’s now rightly viewed as one of country music’s greatest moments. Price would go on to become a superstar in his own right with some schlockier, strings-laden material later in the decade, but Night Life is his finest moment. (For some reason, the reissue of this album that I’m working with only includes “Night Life” with a rather tedious spoken introduction, so I’ve included the Columbia single release as well.)

The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.