Last year ended on a sour note for fans of country music when the great Ray Price died at his Mount Pleasant home following a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer that eventually spread to his liver, lungs and intestines. At the time there was mention of a finished album; it just wasn’t clear if or when it would be released.
But as his wife Janie points out on Facebook this morning, a three-song EP will be released on Amazon this week: Beauty Is … The EP, which opens with “Beauty Lies in the Eyes of the Beholder,” a duet with Vince Gill. The EP’s release will be followed on April 15 by the release of the full-length album Beauty Is … that will be available at Wal-Mart, Cracker Barrel and online. The record will also feature a duet with Martina McBride.
The album was produced by Fred Foster, whose legend began early: He was Roy Orbison’s producer, and the man behind the boards on such such immortals as “Only the Lonely,” “Crying,” “Oh, Pretty Woman” and “Blue Bayou.” More recently he produced the terrific Willie Nelson-Merle Haggard-Ray Price collaboration Last of the Breed, released in 2007. But as Foster says in a release, Price, who died at the age of 87, was far from finished even following his 2011 cancer diagnosis.
“He called me in 2012 and said, ‘I think I have one album left in me; I’m not well, you know,’” Foster says. “He said, ‘I want to do one last one, and I want you to do it with me.’ The whole time we were working together, his state of mind was always really good. You would never know how sick he was to talk to him. What a classy guy.”
You can listen to the EP online, though it’s not yet available to purchase. It’s a too-short tease confirming what Price told Rolling Stone just days before his death: “I haven’t lost my voice, thank God for that.”
Adds Janie in the album’s announcement, “Offstage, he was just the guy I love. When that red light went on in the studio, or when he stepped onto the stage and they handed him that microphone, something happened. It was a higher power. This transformation took place in him. He turned into RAY PRICE.”
