Time

Ray Price

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 27, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Audium Entertainment
• ASIN: B00006BXI4
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #124,818 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

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  Music > Indie Music > Country > Honky-Tonk

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
By now it's a cliché to say that a great older singer's voice has mellowed like fine wine--but sometimes clichés are true, which is how they become clichés in the first place. Ray Price's solid-oak timbre and phrasing here suggest the experience and wisdom of a lounge singer while remaining stone country. Few others could do justice to the hard, complicated truths of "You Just Don't Love Me Anymore" or "If It's All the Same to You," and Price proves he's earned an overwrought lyric like the title song simply by undersinging it. Produced by Nashville veteran Fred Foster, featuring old-hand sidemen who played on Price's shuffling early hits, and even including three songs written by fellow Texan Cindy Walker, Time doesn't come across as nostalgic, but rather as the eloquent statement of a masterful artist who knows he's just not done quite yet, thank you. --John Morthland

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Masterpiece, May 10, 2003

By	Mike Davis (Paris, KY USA) - See all my reviews

Ray Price has one of the greatest voices of all time, and this album is truly a treasure. It's traditional Country the way it should be done. Ray has surrounded himself with top-notch musicians here, including Buddy Emmons, Pete Wade, and Buddy Harman. I think this is Ray's best album in several years. I don't think there's a bad song on here. I highly recommend this album.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the lion in winter, February 8, 2003

By	Jerome Clark (Canby, Minnesota) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Could it get better than this, the pure, hard-won, heart-breaking truths that true country music offers grown-ups?

Ray Price started out as a honkytonk singer and near-clone of Hank Williams, with whom he even roomed for a time in 1952. Over the next few years, however, he developed an original, rhythm-driven style that would virtually define country music in the later 1950s and 1960s. Then he moved on to a smooth, orchestral country-pop style which, truth be told, he did better than anybody since. But it's his small-group, honkytonk-shuffle music that will cement his reputation as one of the immortal country artists.

Over the past three decades he has occasionally returned to that style. Time, his latest, plays to Price's greatest strengths, starting with song selection. Price has always known the difference between a good song and the other stuff. The title tune, by Max D. Barnes, is a tour-de-force, a fierce, unsentimental look at time, "a monster that lives in our clocks/ It's heartless and shows no remorse..../ Like a beast in the jungle/ That devours its young." Except for Cindy Walker's good-natured Western-swing workout "Ft. Worth, Texas," the songs are dark, reflective, melancholy evocations of the toll time's passing and love's wounds inflict. There is the staggering "Both Sides of Good Bye," which will pierce the heart of any listener who's been there and who knows all too well what Price is singing about.

If Nashville music has turned into a vast Hallmark greeting card, Price's art is akin to the letter that remains after love has died ("Take Back Your Old Love Letters") or an adult's fatalistic resignation to faded love ("If It's All the Same to You"). Price tells these stories backed by a superb country band. Though his voice is showing its age around the edges, that only deepens the extraordinary emotion and experience he so starkly and beautifully evokes. This is a great record which deserves to be remembered as long as real country music is remembered.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truely Great Country, March 13, 2003

By	Bruce Zeeff (San Antonio, Tx USA) - See all my reviews

What a great CD. Still one of the grestest voices in all music. This CD is Better than anything they now call country music. Too bad it will never be played on main stream radio.