TOP LEFT PHOTO BY MIKE GILBERT; BOTTOM LEFT PHOTO BY JOSH GICKER; TOP RIGHT PHOTO BY SEAN HAGWELL
Michael Ray
HIS RECENT SEVEN-SONG COLLECTION HIGHER EDUCATION FEATURES THE TITLE TRACK WITH HIS FRIENDS LEE BRICE, BILLY GIBBONS, TIM MONTANA AND KID ROCK. Michael had been profiled in Florida Country Magazine? To make that point at the Luminary in September, as if he had aged wildly, he’d pat his pockets in mock shock, looking for the card key for his room. “Why isn’t it working,” he asked. “Oh … that’s yesterday’s hotel,” busting into a rich baritone laugh, deep and quite real, perhaps another clue to Michael Ray’s success: Never forget who you are and where you came from.
EUSTIS BORN AND BRED
In Michael Ray’s DNA was and is music. Not sports or lawyering or becoming a fishing guide. His family in Eustis, which is 20,000 or so people, performed locally, little Michael plucking a stringless plastic Gibson before stroking a real one quite well. He formed a band and self-released music in 2010. He won a reality television competition in 2012 called The Next: Fame Is at Your Doorstep. He was awarded a contract with Warner Music Nashville. Ray’s first-place performance on The Next, a
music observer said, “sounded just like he should have an album out already.” Music for Michael Ray was as natural as living, inspired by his grandfather, Amos Roach. Mr. Roach died in 2015, just as Michael was to make his Grand Ole Opry debut. “His ear was unbelievable,” Michael Ray told the Tennessean newspaper. “I wish I got that other than some of the other things I got from him. We always laughed about it.” And when Michael Ray debuted at the Grand Ole Opry in 2015, he performed with Amos’s guitar. In 2018, he released “Amos,” an 11-song collection that included “Get to You.” Amos Roach, in fact, had instructed Michael’s father, Jerry, to dial up country music to soothe his crying grandson in the hospital nursery. Michael Ray’s storytelling plays out in his music, whether he’s writing, or his friends are. In Ray’s interview with Florida Country Magazine, for instance, he said of other song writers: “An outsider sometimes says what you want to say better than you can … but not always.”
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