13 minute read
RAY STEVENS
Photo: Angela Talley
Life Is a CabaRay
BY WARREN DENNEY
Ray Stevens moved behind his desk and settled in for conversation. He was at home, in his office at the CabaRay Showroom complex on River Road in Nashville, contemplating the reopening of the venue in September, still weeks away at the time. He was “home” primarily because he was doing what he does every day — tending to his career and to the responsibility of being Ray.
He's done it now for well into eight decades, come hell or high water, pestilence or pandemic. He does what he does, and at age 82, can look back on a life unimaginable to the child that grew up in Albany, Georgia. Stevens, born Harold Ray Ragsdale in 1939, is a singer, a songwriter, an arranger, producer, publisher, multi-instrumentalist, and TV star — in no particular order, but all of a high order.
In spite of his well-crafted persona as a comedian, and writer and performer of monstrously popular novelty songs, Stevens is considered one of the most gifted, multi-talented artists of his generation. He is a two-time Grammy winner, most notably as Male Vocalist of the Year in 1970 for the timeless “Everything Is Beautiful,” a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame, the Christian Music Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2019. He has had six Top Ten hits on the U.S. country or pop charts, including two No. 1’s with “Everything Is Beautiful” and “The Streak.”
These are the fruits of his labor, the things he holds, as he goes about his daily business. He is proud of what he has accomplished, and the showroom at CabaRay honors that life. And, Stevens is all that because he frames his world clearly — there is humor certainly, there is love and beauty, there is sadness — but above all, there is music.
“I liked all kinds of music [growing up],” Stevens said. “I liked country music. My dad was raised on a farm, and he loved country music. I was influenced by him. His favorite singer was Lefty Frizzell. And I liked Eddy Arnold. I liked all kinds of people. And of course, pop artists like Patti Page used to cross over a little bit with ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and things like that.
“But, the more I learned about music, the more of a musician I became, and the more I appreciated the nuances in all styles of music. And country music is no different. I mean, show me a good steel guitar player, and I’ll show you a hell of a musician.”
He could appreciate those nuances because he was an advanced musician by the time he reached his teens. He was ripe for discovery, and following his family’s move from Albany to Atlanta, Stevens met publisher Bill Lowery, and took a first, small step into his musical career. He was introduced to Lowery while still attending Druid Hills High School.
“I was in high school,” Stevens said. “And, I went to Clairmont Hills Baptist Church. My Sunday school teacher owned a radio station in Decatur — WEAS. I must have gotten up in church and played the piano, and sang or something. Anyway, he told me one morning in a Sunday school class, I needed to meet Bill Lowery. Lowery had just started his publishing company and was looking for songs. I met him, and he said ‘Lad, write me a song.’
“So I went home that night all pumped up, and I wrote a song and took it to him. It was a good song and he liked it.” Lowery called his friend and producer, Ken Nelson, at Capitol, who liked what he heard, and signed Stevens to Prep Records, a subsidiary label.
Lowery suggested he change his name, and Nelson brought him to Nashville to record “Silver Bracelet,” a regional hit out of Atlanta for the young 17 year old. That was 1957.
“I had come to Nashville to make a record,” Stevens said. “Bill knew the studios in Atlanta weren’t up to par at the time. He moved his office out of his basement, which was the first place I met him, into an old grammar-school house in Brookhaven, Georgia, which is out West Peachtree. And it had a lunchroom, and we turned that into a studio.
Photo: Angela Talley
“There was a big septic tank out in the yard, which was behind the school, we pumped it out and put a mic and a speaker in there and made that into an echo chamber...I loved that place. I was a big fan of WOAK in Atlanta. I used to listen to it all the time, because it was the Black station, and they played the Drifters and the Clovers, and the Midnighters and all that old R&B. ‘Work with Me Annie.’ High school kids loved that stuff.”
Stevens always had a band, or was in a band, in those formative days, but was unsure of which path to really follow. He had dreams of being an architect and attending Georgia Tech, where Lowery was the football play-by-play broadcaster, but wound up at Georgia State, studying music. It was Lowery who believed Stevens would be a big success.
“Well, I always had a little band, ever since I was 15, in high school,” Stevens said. “But I always thought of it as a sideline. And Bill encouraged me. He said ‘Lad, you don’t want to be an architect. Stay in the music business. You’ll be very successful.’”
Of course, Lowery was right, though Stevens still designs and concepts some building projects on his own today and is a veteran real estate developer. He’s a builder, no matter how you cut it, whether as a writer, arranger, or producer — or as a dreamer in brick and mortar.
“I didn’t really have a big hit until 1961, and it wasn’t really that big,” Stevens said, laughing. “I was still living in Atlanta, and I wrote and recorded ‘Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,’ based on the radio show. Later, it became a TV show.
“The song was taking off like a rocket. It was going to be a good record, but I had neglected to get permission from the people who owned the character, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, to use in STEVENS a song. Their [CBS] lawyers sent me a cease-anddesist letter, and I ceased and desisted.
“I was maybe nineteen or twenty, but that experience gave me a clue, and I wrote a song, ‘Jeremiah Peabody’s Poly Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills,’ which was some kind of a record for a lengthy title. It was a small hit.”
That small hit belies Stevens’ big bang. It was his key that unlocked the ever-strange consciousness of the American listening public. The song landed in 1961, the year he signed with Mercury Records, and Stevens moved to Nashville for good in January of 1962.
“Jerry Reed and I had a band in Atlanta,” Stevens said. “We’d go out and play a show on WTJH, the Georgia Jubilee, in East Point on Saturdays. We’d open for the big star they’d bring in from Nashville every weekend. One week, Shelby Singleton, who was in charge of promotion for Mercury in the Southeast, brought in the Big Bopper to sing ‘Chantilly Lace.’ I played and sang, and Shelby must have been impressed. Mercury had promoted him to A&R, and he had moved to Nashville by then.
“He called Bill and asked if I wanted a job. He wound up offering me an assistant A&R job, but it only paid fifty dollars a week. I balked because I had just gotten married and had a new baby. I told him we couldn’t live on that, and he told me then I could play on all the sessions — hundreds he said — and of course I said we’d be right there. Penny and I loaded up everything and drove over Monteagle and here we were.”
After arriving he joined AFM Local 257 on Jan. 6, 1962.
Stevens soon found himself in the company of many of the best musicians on the planet. He and Singleton, along with Jerry Kennedy, would rehearse artists, listen to submitted material, and produce songs with an evolving list of A-team session musicians. That same month he and his family moved to Nashville, he wrote and recorded his first truly big hit “Ahab the Arab,” which buried itself deeply within that strange American consciousness, and still reverberates today — albeit much differently.
The song, drawn from his memories of reading Tales from the Arabian Nights: Stories of Adventure, Magic, Love, and Betrayal, changed everything for Stevens, and led to a string of comedic hits in the 1960s, including “Harry the Hairy Ape,” and “Gitarzan,” and “Along Came Jones.” He signed with Fred Foster and Monument Records in 1966, and recorded a broad range of songs, which included “Mr. Businessman,” “Have a Little Talk with Myself,” and his own version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”
Stevens considers those times a manifestation of everything to which he had been exposed — a convergence as he grew into the artist. American radio was wide open, certainly compared to the post-apocalyptic landscape of today. Everything he had soaked in over the years informed his music, and his playing. The kid who wrote about teen love in “Silver Bracelet” could easily embrace doo-wop and R&B, and wind up playing organ and singing background vocals on Waylon Jennings’ “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” or producing some of Dolly Parton’s first records at Monument. The world was calling.
“Inadvertently, subconsciously, yes, it did,” Stevens said of his background. “Yes. I remember old songs of all kinds, growing up, because back in those days, radio wasn’t compartmentalized at all. Big stations, WSB in Atlanta, they would play everything. They’d play a smorgasbord of stuff.
“It’s hard for me to gauge in today’s world, because everything I know is so available. But it seems to me that we were exposed to more of a variety. And that’s more educational really, if you look at it. Today, people, unless they really want to have the time and the desire to check out the other types of music, they just tune their radio station to, say, a country station, and that's all they ever hear.
“America's been dumbed down tremendously in the area of music. Music appreciation, I should say.”
Stevens views himself as a natural animal in the business.He makes music, from every angle conceivable. He’s certainly worked with the best over the years. And, he’s a fundamental building block in the foundation of Nashville as we know it.
“I’ve never sensed the deep end of the pool,” Stevens said. “I thought that the guys that were making the music, the session musicians, were really great. They’re on the walls in CabaRay. There’s a plaque there that honors the pioneers — the producers and the musicians in those studios that helped create the Nashville Sound, and who built Music City, USA.”
Through Stevens’ friendship with Roger Miller, he connected with manager Donny Williams, and would ultimately leave Monument for Barnaby Records, a label owned by singer Andy Williams. Stevens performed on Williams’ hit variety show on NBC, and he was offered the opportunity to host it as the summer replacement in 1970. Again, timing was everything. He wrote “Everything Is Beautiful” for the show.
“So I wrote it after that [television] deal was made because I wanted to write a song that could be used as a theme song that summer,” Stevens said. “I mean, I’ll aspire to anything. And, luckily enough, it was perfect. I was scared to death.
“Fred [Foster] magnanimously let me go to record it for Barnaby, which was newly started and distributed by CBS … it was a scary thing, to do a TV show, and to leave Monument, but it was great. Oh, and I screwed up a lot.”
Stevens continued his roll with “The Streak” in 1974, before landing his biggest country hit with the Erroll Gardner / Johnny Burke classic “Misty.” He earned his second Grammy for Best Arrangement as he interpreted the song through a bluegrass framework. He’s always maintained a presence in the American psyche, and scored hits with “The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” and “Shriner’s Convention” in the 1980s before opening a venue in Branson, Missouri.
He continued releasing new recordings, including Hum It (1997), Osama Yo’-Mama: The Album (2002), Laughter Is the Best Medicine (2009), Sings Sinatra … Say What? (2009), We the People (2010), Spirit of ’76 (2011), Just A Closer Walk With Thee: Gospel Favorites (2016), among many others. All told, Stevens has released 21 records since 2000.
In January 2018, Stevens opened his CabaRay Showroom, a 700-seat dinner theater, and if that weren’t enough, he has continued to cannily market himself through direct television advertising campaigns of award-winning video collections of performances, a practice he began in the early-1990s, and has built loyal audience with original songs of a patriotic, if not political, bend.
Stevens has released a set of four albums this year, Iconic Sounds of the Twentieth Century: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, in which he covers many of the greatest popular songs recorded, on Curb Records, and most recently has released his latest comedy album Ain’t Nothin’ Funny Anymore, somewhat of a return to his roots, also on Curb.
His creative energy still drives him. As does his sense of humor.
“I’ve been in the studio — I’ve just been making records,” Stevens said. “That’s what I do, and I enjoy the heck out of it. So, I go in and make records. And, I still like to go on stage and make people laugh and make people feel the music.
“I’m constantly evolving. I’m a better songwriter than I ever was, because I've figured out what not to do. That’s a big one — figure out what not to do. What’s the doctor’s creed? First, do no harm. As a songwriter, first, write no bad stuff, you know.”
Photo: Slick Lawson
RAY STEVENS RIG
STAGE SETUP
• Kurzweil PC88 keyboard • Fender Squire mini electric guitar • Peavey LTD 400 amp • Sure KSM8 series vocal mic
STUDIO SETUP
• Kurzweil 250 keyboard • Hammond B-3 with Leslie cabinet • Techniques PR-3 keyboard • Roland RD-700 keyboard • K. Kawai 7 foot grand piano • Black Pearl Drums • Neuman U-48 vocal mic
