Ray Price – The Other Woman

Ray Price’s chart career usually gets talked about as if it has two distinct periods. First there are the great honky-tonk years that included masterpiece singles such as “Crazy Arms”, and then there’s his crappy, post-“Danny Boy” countrypolitan hits like “For The Good Times”. Leaving aside that a fair number of those countrypolitan recordings were actually nothing short of gorgeous, Price’s 1965 album The Other Woman would appear to fall into the classic honky-tonk period. Or, as country music historian Rich Kienzle writes in the liner notes to the album’s new Koch reissue: “[Price’s] performance reflected the sound he’d created nearly a decade ago.”

But it didn’t. In fact, The Other Woman doesn’t fit comfortably in either camp. Like most of the music Price recorded in the mid-’60s — just about everything between the releases of the string-framed “Make The World Go Away” and the bluesy “Night Life” in 1963 and his hit recording of “Danny Boy” in 1967 — The Other Woman is a transitional record. It’s still a classic Price album, but placed more accurately, it’s also an album that shows Price in the process of making significant changes to his much-loved ’50s sound on the way to a countrypolitan future.

The differences between mid-’50s Price classics and the dozen tracks on The Other Woman are unmistakable. The famous Ray Price beat is still in place, of course, but it’s regularly slowed down here — by this point in his career, Price was more interested in ballads than shuffles — and while those famous heavily-bowed fiddles once dominated the arrangements, these newer recordings more typically rely on the beautiful work of pedal steel master Buddy Emmons and the gentle picking of guitar legend Grady Martin.

There’s also a new sense of space in these recordings; every hole isn’t filled with sound. Consequently, where the playing on great earlier hits like “Heartaches By The Number” and “I’ve Got A New Heartache” sounded tightly wound, as if their narrators were trying in vain to dance away their troubles, these newer songs feel as if they’re slowly unraveling. As on Price’s similar-sounding Night Life two years earlier, these songs and characters sound as if they’ve already given up — not dancing anymore, just floating wearily on irresistible breezes of long-lingering loss. These changes are apparent throughout The Other Woman, even on the title track, a #2 hit in 1965 and the only song here that even comes close to that old-school shuffle sound.

Reflecting Nashville’s move from post-Hank hillbilly-isms to the post-Elvis Nashville Sound, these changes in Price’s approach were in many ways representative of their time — a historic shift that is perhaps best illustrated by the new way Price was singing. Even back in the ’50s, Price’s vocal style had always been something of a croon, and once he stopped mimicking his friend Hank Williams, his singing rarely featured the flights of melisma that filled the honky-tonk recordings of contemporaries such as Lefty Frizzell and George Jones.

But by The Other Woman, Price had moved to crooning full-time. In fact, his readings here of “Unloved, Unwanted”, “This Cold War With You” (both among his finest vocals ever), “Born To Lose” and “Don’t You Ever Get Tired Of Hurting Me” (the album’s second hit single) each highlight state-of-the-art crooning. All four of these numbers, like everything else here, feature Price vocals that are hushed, restrained, way up front in the mix, sung in the smooth lower registers he’d been using for a couple of years by then, and filled with the most vulnerable of vibratos.

Graced with smartly-placed pop epiphanies, Price’s subtle, revealing phrasing only serves to make his few non-crooning choices all the more significant. On a brilliant “Funny How Time Slips Away”, for example, he packs a half-dozen syllables into his high, crying “How”, and the effect is emotionally powerful, in part because it’s just so unexpected.

Ray Price the crooner was (and remains) a singer’s singer. He’s one of the finest vocalists that country music — heck, that any genre — has ever produced. On The Other Woman, he may have even outdone himself.