CHAPTER 14 "Night Life" Part One
Linda Ronstadt remembered the first time she heard Buddy Emmons. “I was in a country club someplace in Tucson—I think I was about seventeen. The jukebox was playing and all of a sudden “Night Life” came on. And I went, ‘What is that?’ I was there with a pedal steel player I was dating at the time. He said, ‘Oh, that’s Buddy Emmons. He’s the best one.’ And I went ‘Wow!’
“So I bought that record and just listened to it over and over again because that opening [sings ‘do do do doooo, do do doooo’] and the way it changes the inner harmonies, it’s amazing. It was voicings and a texture I’d never heard before on the pedal steel. I was completely smitten.”
Ray Price, with his rich, expressive voice, was by 1963 in his prime as the premier male honky-tonk singer. That year he recorded his landmark album
Night Life for Columbia Records, one of the earliest concept albums in country music. Together, the songs on Night Life create a patchwork storyline that starkly captures the bitter loneliness of the road and its life filled with beer joints, one-night stands, sorrow, and regret. The six-minute-long title song, written by Willie Nelson, became a perfect vehicle for Price’s dark, bluesy vocals and for Buddy’s nuanced, haunting pedal steel. The
Night Life album—which also featured a song written by Nelson and Emmons entitled “Are You Sure”—reached #1 on the Billboard country album charts, becoming a honky-tonk classic.
The “Night Life” arrangement came about during a Texas tour. The song was scheduled for a session in Nashville, so Ray wanted us to arrange it so we could play it on our dance jobs and check out the response. Ray’s signature style was the shuffle with a walking bass line. Neither would have fit the slow bluesy feel of “Night Life,” so I came up with a set of chords used in jazz; turnaround chords were typically used at the end of a verse to set the song up for the second verse. Buddy liked “Midnight Sun,” a tune written in 1954 by Lionel Hampton, Sonny Burke, and Johnny Mercer. It featured some unusual jazz turnaround chords right before the song’s second verse.
I’d never heard them on the intro of a song, so I chose them for the “Night Life” intro. It was nothing like Ray had ever done before, but neither was the song “Night Life,” so I thought I’d have a little fun with it. I figured what the heck; it would be only four chords we’d have to change. Meanwhile I was using raised 9ths and augmented 11th chords in my fills, knowing they could be eliminated when it came time to record.
When [we rehearsed it] at the session, Ray had enough band members there to know the arrangement, so we played and the producer listened. Session piano legend and Country Music Hall of Fame member Hargus “Pig” Robbins said he was “scared to death” when he first heard the intro. “They started playing all those big jazz chords in the intro and I was thinking, “What am I going to play against all that?” Once I got into it I just played some honky-tonk blues: it started feeling natural to me to play, like in a nightclub. I’m a three-chord hillbilly man; it was as close to honky-tonk jazz as I could get.”
Buddy used his Sho-Bud steel and Grady Martin’s tremolo amplifier on the session. “He wanted to use that sound. He went over and manually controlled the tremolo as I played the chorus. He just stood by the amp and regulated the speed.”
When we finished, I waited for producer Don Law to say, “It was good but we should change some of the chords.” Instead he pushed the talkback button and said, “We like it; let’s do it.” I almost fell off my chair. We had just broken every rule on a country music recording session.
Ray Price remembered liking Buddy’s “Night Life” intro from the start: “It helped make the song. Buddy was never a drawback; he was right there with me. Whenever he plays, we look at each other and we smile because we both are enjoying what we’re doing.” Buddy often described how Ray’s voice could push him to new musical heights. “Ray’s heart and soul was so much in tune with mine on sessions, it brought about a quality in my playing that otherwise would never have surfaced. We had a silent rapport with each other. The better he sang, the better I played; the better I played, the better he sang.”
The album’s “Are You Sure” came about in an unusual way. “Willie [Nelson] and I entered a bar on Broad Street in Nashville one hot afternoon to blow the foam off a couple of beers,” remembered Buddy. “We found a booth and started engaging in what I call ‘shop talk’ when a guy walked up and slipped into the seat beside me. I thought he was a friend of Willie’s and I guess Willie thought he was a friend of mine, so neither of us said anything.
“Meanwhile, every time the guy shifted positions he would nudge me into a wall to the left of the booth. When it became clear that he wasn’t Willie’s friend, I looked at him and asked, ‘Are you about where you want to be?’ He answered, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Are you sure?’ to which he gave me another yes. I don’t remember what Willie or I said after that, but the guy was up and out of the booth shortly thereafter.
“When the dust settled, Willie looked at me and said, ‘That’s a good title,’ or something like that, and I asked what he meant. He said, ‘Are You Sure, that’s a good song title.’ Then he followed with, ‘I’ll write it and give you half.’ I laughed it off and told him he didn’t have to do that and he replied, ‘A title is as good as a song; I’ll do it.’ It was a point in my life when I was standing in the middle of everything I owned, so it was all I could do to act cool about it. After a couple more beers, which Willie probably paid for, we left.
“A few months later I was in the recording studio with Ray Price when Ray came up with a song called ‘Are You Sure.’ After we rehearsed it a couple of times we took a break and I asked Ray who wrote ‘Are You Sure.’ He told me it was a Willie Nelson song. I couldn’t believe my ears, but I kept my mouth shut when he didn’t mention my name as co-writer. When the record came out it had Willie’s name as the writer because that’s the way Ray turned it in. Later I started receiving checks from BMI as co-writer and found that Willie was true to his word.” When Willie learned that Buddy wasn’t listed as a co-writer, he went to Columbia Records, to BMI, and to his publisher and had everything changed to reflect Buddy’s co-authorship.
Dale Thomas—a steel guitarist and singer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa—first met Buddy Emmons in Nashville around 1959. Dale stayed in touch with Emmons, and whenever Buddy appeared on tour in the area, Dale would attend. In 1963, at a Ray Price concert in Cedar Rapids, Dale went backstage after the performance to say hi to Buddy. As Dale remembered, “Buddy said, ‘Hey, we’re at the Holiday Inn tomorrow. Why don’t you come on over and we’ll play a little bit.’ My friend Jim Hemingway came along and we arrived the next morning and went to Buddy’s room.”
Dale was stunned to see Buddy wearing a cast on one leg.
“There he was laying in the bed . . . I don’t remember if he had a full cast or if it was just wrapped. He laid his steel guitar across his lap, propped himself up with a couple of pillows, and we started. I was playing my flattop guitar, and Buddy was playing with no pedals on his C6 neck. He just kept going and going. I have never heard anyone play with more creativity and cleanliness than he did that day, laying there with his foot in a cast.”
Fortunately, Dale Thomas brought along a tape recorder and captured the moment, a rare chance to hear Buddy Emmons in his prime during the early ’60s, just a couple of months before the release of his celebrated recording,
Steel Guitar Jazz.
Thomas donated his recording to the Country Music Hall of Fame. It can be heard here:
https://digi.countrymusichalloffame.org ... o/id/9093/
