Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ray Price: Last of the Breed

CML call number: CD COUNTRY Nelson
Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times: "Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard — that just would have been easy business. And, put in terms of copyright and back catalog, it would have been a follow-through on 'Pancho and Lefty,' the hit record they made together almost 25 years ago. But to triangulate them with Ray Price, as the new record 'Last of the Breed' does, is to structure a summit meeting on honky-tonk singing. The three singers are connected by lots of small résumé items … but also in one big way. They are all magnetized toward the sound of Bob Wills’s Texas swing. Mr. Haggard, for his part, seems drawn to the kind of frontman Wills was: a sporadic fiddle player, spontaneous organizer of arrangements and agent of the unpredictable. Mr. Price, for his part, long ago adapted Wills’s twin-fiddle breaks, folding them into nearly all his honky-tonk hits of the 1950s and ’60s. As for Mr. Nelson, a Texan, a country singer and an improviser, Wills is part of his light and air. … There are 22 songs on the album, from the repertory of their favorite ’40s and ’50s country songwriters" ("A Half-Century of Honky-Tonk With a Trove of Hits," 3/24/07).