Country legend Ray Price died a year ago this month after losing his battle with pancreatic cancer, but just before he died he finished recording his final album, "Beauty Is...The Final Sessions." The album, released in April, is an emotion-drenched musical love letter to his wife of 43 years, Janie Price.
Recently, while discussing the album and other aspects of Price's life and times with Rolling Stone Country's Joseph Hudak, Janie recalled her husband's beefs with Blake Shelton and Dean Martin. Shelton's was a very public flap - lived out in the newspapers and magazines and on the airwaves of country radio. The Martin disagreement was just between Price, Martin and the producers of the "Dean Martin Comedy Hour."
Price got hot under the collar and really fired up when Shelton made an off-handed remark in 1973 about "old farts" in country music. For the most part, the comment was taken out of context, but that didn't slow down Price from immediately responding.
"This guy sounds like, in his own mind, that his head is so large no hat ever made will fit him," Price wrote of Shelton.
Eventually, Shelton and Price mended fences, and the younger star made a surprise appearance at a Price concert in Oklahoma.
"Ray said Blake was not going to get on stage because he was worried people were going to start throwing things at him from the audience," Janie said while laughing. "But Ray said, 'I have a special guest here that I want you to say hello to, and I want everyone to be really nice to him,' and there was this gasp through the whole audience. That was a big thing for Blake to do.
"Ray changed the sound of country music, he brought it to the modern age and expanded it to a larger audience," Janie continues. "Blake Shelton stepped into something that Ray Price did. The gift was given to him. Ray paid the dues and he was so proud of it."
Then there was the Price-Martin tiff. When the producers of Martin's variety show asked Price to perform in a cowboy costume against a set of hay bales, the country star said "whoa" and then challenged the crooner to get before the camera in his own western garb.
"Ray said, 'I don't wear hats. You go and get Dean Martin and if he will wear the hat and sit on this bale of hay with me, I'll do it,'" Janie remembered. Martin realized he had a defiant Texan on his hands, so he rose to the occasion and joined Price on the bales.
"They propped their feet up on the bales of hay-Ray didn't do it by himself," Janie said.
