![]() Gill: Eddie would play something cool and then he’d be all fired up and go, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, that steel guitar solo is one of the best… I’m gonna put the needle back about where the solo’s gonna start, so turn your radios up now, we’re gonna play that solo again.” He’d do stuff like that all the time. I love the idea of you calling in to Eddie Stubbs late at night to request he play songs you didn’t know. So all the people we’ve loved have also been very instrumental in having great bands with great players, and we were drawn to the players of some of these great artists as much as the artists themselves. I could sing the songs, so that worked out pretty good, and away we went.Īnd all those bands that we loved, whether it was the Strangers that played with Merle, or the Buckaroos that played with Buck, or the Cherokee Cowboys that played with Ray … Before they were the Cherokee Cowboys, they were Hank’s (Williams’) band, the Drifting Cowboys, and a lot of the guys that played with Hank went on after his passing to play with Ray. Neither of these records has had the point of it being about the singer so much, but this was more about both of us being musicians that wanted to be creative together. ![]() So it was fun for us, because we got to discover some stuff that we didn’t know as well, and found a way to play it that suited the way we both play and the way way I sing. I think we even did that with “Bakersfield,” too we didn’t go to the most obvious choices. And I think Paul and I both didn’t really want to do the songs that most people would assume you would do when you’re trying to do the music of another artist. I’m like most people I knew the really successful records. I would listen to him all the time and call him up and say, “Man, play me something that you know I’ve never heard.” And he’d break out a Ray Price record and send it my way (over the airwaves)- songs like “One More Time,” “Kissing Your Picture,” some of those things that I’d never even heard. Eddie Stubbs was a great disc jockey here in Nashville for a long time - and a great bluegrass country fiddle player, who came to town to play with Kitty Wells many, many years ago, and he was always on WSM late at night. And thanks to Eddie Stubbs, we found the best hidden gems. These songs were obscure - I didn’t know a lot of them. A lot of them didn’t have steel, and certainly didn’t have the type of steel we put on them. Not all the original Ray Price recordings you’re covering had steel on them, right? Are you introducing steel to some of these songs for the first time?įranklin: That’s a great question. So I think over a period of time, you’ll see more and more of these (tributes to) people that are special to us. And we’ve talked about doing maybe George Jones and Conway Twitty and Little Jimmy Dickens. ![]() And the same with Buck and Merle: I got to sing on some of Merle’s last recordings, and Buck sent me one of them red, white and blue guitars. Paul and I both got to play or sing on Ray Price’s last record we were friends. But with the people that we wanted to do, there’s a really deep connection. From the get-go, when we did Buck and Merle and did “Bakersfield,” we thought we could do several of these. When you were doing your previous collaboration a decade ago, were you thinking of it then as a possible franchise? Variety sat down with Franklin and Gill prior to the album’s street date about working on a project that completely conjures the spirit of an era without making any attempt to actually copy the original records. It may not make a big dent on the charts - although Gill is prone to joking about competing with Morgan Wallen - but for anyone who reveres traditional country sounds, “Sweet Memories,” which came out Friday, counts as an event release. ![]() We don’t get to play much of it, and it’s fun for us to go back and not only honor who we revere, but also get the opportunity to play what we first learned to play, and it takes us back to our youth in a great way.” It’s just not real popular.’ That’s a big difference, you know? … I think the real point of all this is we miss that kind of music. As Gill puts it in an interview with Variety: “People say all the time, ‘Country music’s dead.’ I go, ‘No, it’s not.
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