Prisoner of Love
At the age of 74, Ray Price has released an album that can be heard as both a career capper and an ambitious new chapter. After acknowledging his honky-tonk roots with the opening "Better Class of Loser," the countrypolitan crooner addresses the classic American songbook, applying his conversational phrasing to material immortalized by the likes ofLouis Armstrong("What a Wonderful World"),Frank Sinatra("Fly Me to the Moon"), andBillie Holiday("Body & Soul"). Only the Beatles' "In My Life" sounds like too much of an interpretive stretch for Price. Where many of his crossover hits in the '60s and early '70s suffered from saccharine production, here the string arrangements by David Campbell (father of pop starBeck) recall the bittersweet sophistication of Nelson Riddle's Sinatra sessions. FilePrisoner of Lovenext to Willie Nelson'sStarduston the short shelf of genre-busting country classics.--Don McLeese