The Making Good of Randy Ray

By JAY COCKS

You will know the voice right away, even if you have never heard it. A backcountry baritone canters along a line of swaying melody, taking it easy, taking everything easy. The prides, the miseries, the dalliances and departures that are the mother lode of country music, all are delved into and delivered up with the sidling grace of an unordained preacher taking the back door into honky-tonk heaven.

In the fast lane of a Los Angeles freeway, a Randy Travis song on the car radio can put you, all at once, onto a stretch of two-lane blacktop. A tune like On the Other Hand or What'll You Do About Me can turn a city singles bar into a state-route sugar shack. If there is a new spirit in country, just about the friendliest place to get acquainted with it is on the tracks of Travis' fine new album, Always & Forever.

"Pure country went down for several years," Travis observes, and his recent success has done a lot to pick it up and dust it off. His previous album, Storms of Life, has sold 1.3 million copies so far (the new album, out a month and a half, has already sold more than half that). It has corralled him four awards from the Academy of Country Music, including best single and best album, and four more from last week's Music City News Awards. "Boy," he recalls, still wondering a little at the memory, "when the Academy announced | male vocalist of the year, you're talking about a shock. Winning in the same category with George Jones and George Strait!" Along with his armful of trophies, Randy got himself invited to join the Grand Ole Opry -- at 28 he is the youngest member ever -- and is currently burning up the interstates on tour.

Country music now holds about 10% of the recording market (down from 15% in 1981). Nashville music executives insist, however, that everything is turning around. Forecasts like that are as reliable as the 6 o'clock weather, but at the moment Nashville seems to have the talent to back up its boast. "I know that country music is going out to a lot of kids," Travis says. "You see a lot of teenagers and even little kids who know the words to the songs." There still may not be an overabundance of youth at a typical country concert, but the music in the Nashville air has a youthful flair that embraces and reconciles the roots rock of Steve Earle, the delicate harmonies of the Judds, the lively lyrical byplay of the O'Kanes.

In this crowd, Travis is the proud traditionalist. He has not redefined country so much as reminded everyone of its truest instincts. "I don't like to hear a country singer doing crossover," he admits. "Young people started turning their radios to hear Alabama and Kenny Rogers, and they began to hear George Strait and Ricky Skaggs." It is not necessary to press Travis' good country manners by asking his candid opinion of Rogers. The performers who command his respect can be heard in the echoes his music stirs: Strait and Skaggs and, especially, George Jones, and, reaching further back, Bob Wills' Western swing. At concerts Travis will even do tunes associated with Roy Rogers and those harmonizers of early sunrises and dusty trails, the Sons of the Pioneers. He shows pride in his roots and stays close to them too. He has, after all, been away only for a few years.

Second oldest in a family of six kids, Travis (born Traywick) grew up on a turkey farm in Marshville, N.C. He took up guitar at age eight, and with the encouragement of his parents, learned to play it just the way he does now: badly. "I can hear things, but I can't play them," he admits. Onstage he will strum a few chords as he fronts his band. In the recording studio, "I don't play anything. The producer uses session players. I have input, but he tells them what to play." Travis has logged some of the hard knocks required for solid country writing, including dropping out of school in ninth grade and, on occasion, getting bailed out of jail. "I thought I knew it all, and wanted to do just what I wanted to do," he recalls. "Run away from home, maybe run with the wrong crowd, just trying to be a tough kid." His father wasn't always fast about getting him out of the lockup: "Once in a while he'd get mad and leave me for a day or so to teach me a lesson."

With all this background, however, Travis is still a reluctant writer. Of the 20 songs on his two albums, he is credited or co-credited only with five. "I'll never get to the point where I just record what I write," he says. "First off, I don't write that much. And there's not that many people that write that good. We don't care who writes a song as long as it's great." But ask him about the early days, when he was 14 and won a talent contest at the Country City U.S.A. club in Charlotte, N.C., and he will describe them by saying "That was 1977. I was singing whatever was hits. I wasn't doing anything of mine." Spoken like a man who knows, even now, all he has to do to make a tune his own is sing it.

Country City Owner Lib Hatcher encouraged changing his stage name from Randy Ray, and when she moved on to the Nashville Palace, took him along with her. He sang, cooked and did odd jobs around the place, until someone from Warner Bros. Records caught his act in 1985 and signed him up. He uses different tools now, but the work, under the careful guidance of Manager Hatcher, is still tough. Randy remains unmarried, the better to handle the road. Bus it. (But no drugging, drinking or smoking on board. "People are sure gonna be healthier working with us," Randy allows. And besides, smoke irritates his "real bad allergies.") Break. Bus. Set up. Play. Bus it again. Keep it professional; put the personal stuff on hold. It's that same old endless highway that circles the heart of country, a road that Randy Travis is already well along. "Do what you love, and be what you are," he says. "To me that's country music. With me, what you see is what I got." When Travis met Roy Acuff at the Grand Ole Opry, country's elder statesman told him, "We need you." Randy was flattered. The rest of us can make do with feeling lucky.

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Calhoun, Ga.