Non-annoying boy of the week: Ray Price

Ray Price

Sad Billionaire here, back again. Apologies for my lack of postage of late.

I was listening to CDs by country music legend Ray Price today, trying to do one hundred thousand dishes. If you are not a Ray Price fan, you owe it to yourselves to check out the master of lachrymose country-and-western self pity. A lot of folks who get into country male vocalists seem to stop with Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and George Jones. And while I also love the tough-guy swagger of these singers, I have been really moved by my discovery of what can only be called the "absurdly and frighteningly emotional" school of country song interpretation. A Ray Price record has more over-the-top blubbering than Morrisey singing Schubert lieder while chopping a whole bag of vidalias with a dull Ginsu.

Now, Ray Price made some pretty questionable records with string sections and other atrocities of the Nashville music machine. But the classic stuff from the 50s and 60s with the Cherokee Cowboys is totally unbeatable. Particulary recommended is the Audium CD reissue of "Burning Memories/Touch My Heart." Holy fuck. Price probes the inner architecture of despair and betrayal inherent in doomed love affairs, all the while maintaining a stoic air of wry resignation. When he gooses a line with outrageous sentimentality, one cannot help but collapse in a puddle of writhing sympathy-melancholy.

Whatever you want to say about that, it is definitely not annoying!