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After Dark: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Ray Price deliver
By Matt Sutkoski
Freee Press Staff Writer
ESSEX JUNCTION — Old country stars don’t die, and they don’t fade away either.Ray Price, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson demonstrated that much at their performance Sunday night at the Champlain Valley Fair. They showed us how some of the best of country music is done.
Each man specializes in songs about regret: Promising relationships end badly. Important things are left unsaid. Hearts break repeatedly. You find the bottom of your soul at the bottom of that last beer you drank.
Somehow, the regret sounds more authentic coming from these three old country singers, even if they wrote the songs in question decades ago when they were young. You see them on stage with their weathered faces and white hair. They’ve been around a long time. They know what they’re singing about. Call them sages, if you like.
Ray Price was first up. He walked stiffly onto the stage, yet his smooth baritone voice has not diminished a bit. Price has impeccable country credentials, but his singing recalls Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby as much as anything else. He put his classic voice to many of his familiar hits, like “Release Me,” “Heartache By the Number” and “City Lights.”
Cities are places to hide, and Price knows they can hide pain, too. “The cabarets and honky tonks, their flashy lights invite/A broken heart to lose itself in the glow of city lights.”
Some of Price’s songs are sad, but the singer himself is undiminished. “I’m 81 years old. I ain’t tired yet,” he told a cheering crowd.
Next up was Haggard, dressed in a black suit, black fedora and sunglasses. He’s 70 years old, and sounded a bit hesitant as he opened with “Workin’ Man Blues.” But he quickly hit his stride and was in good form by the time he got to “Swinging Doors,” about a barfly whose home has those swinging doors, a barstool and a neon sign.
Haggard drew even more energy, when halfway through “Okie from Muskogee,” Willie Nelson strolled onto the stage for an assist.
The best moments of the night were some brief interludes when all three men were on stage together. Price sang Nelson’s “Crazy” (the song made famous by Patsy Cline) with Haggard on guitar. And of course Nelson and Haggard had to do their hit duet, “Pancho & Lefty,” an enigmatic song about two men whose path cross, one ends up dead in Mexico, the other flees to Ohio, and everything’s bleak. “The desert’s quiet, Cleveland’s cold and so the story ends we’re told,” Haggard and Nelson sang, sounding as good as they did when they first sang it together maybe 25 years ago.
All these dark songs by no means imply these guys didn’t want to have fun. Haggard and his excellent band The Strangers stomped their way merrily through “Take Me Back to Tulsa” and other hits. “We’re just an old beer joint band. We started playing for drunks and look at us now,” Haggard said.
Nelson, 74, had a good time, too, bringing on hits like “Beer for My Horses” and “On the Road Again.” He did a crowd-pleasing “Moonlight in Vermont.” But Nelson is the king of heartbreak. He was exquisite on “Always on My Mind” and “Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain.”
He tried some new songs, too. He did a gorgeous version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Moment of Forever,” which Nelson said will be on his next CD.
Toward the end of the show, Nelson sang a jaunty tune that went, “I try to do more than I can. I ain’t Superman.”
No you’re not, Willie. Haggard is no Superman either. Neither is Price. But Sunday night they reminded us that good country music is so much more than beer and pickup trucks.
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