Looking back on your career, are there songs you feel should’ve gotten more recognition?
I get to take feedback from the audience, and the audience will let you know what they want to hear. I love it on stage with my band because I get to sing what I want to sing. What do you think about all the changes in the country msuic industry? Obviously, radio’s changed. Those kind of stories come from Chet Akins because he produced all that stuff. One day there was nobody there to tell him to back up because that engineer passed away, so you couldn’t get Jim out of the microphone anymore. I’d sit and talk with Chet Atkins, “What was it about Jim Reeves? He always wanted to be tight to the mic.” But the engineers would tell him to back off, because he was getting too much proximity effect. I had to become real good friends with the engineer because I wanted to cut records that sounded a lot like Jim Reeves. He called Archie Jordan, the songwriter, “Archie, you’re about to have your fist No. She said, “What is that?” I said, “That’s that song you hate.” She called my record producer Tom Collins. He’s not a great singer.” Then I got home after touring season and worked up an arrangement on that song. She said, “Why do you keep listening to that thing? The singer’s awful.” I said, “Okay, I’ll give you that. My wife Joyce and I were out on the road in ’76 and I kept playing her this demo. You listen to a song and decide if you can make this song your own. We hear these songs and we know what a Ronnie Milsap song sounds like. I wanted to ask you about your gift for interpretation, how you make a song your own. Give me one, too.” I hadn’t smoked in 18 years, and I was hooked again. You don’t allow it.” I said, “But I do this morning. The engineer I was with said, “Goddamn it, Ronnie, if you’d just let me stop and have a cigarette, I’d get this mixed for you.” I said, “Hey, what are you smoking?” He said, “We can’t smoke in the control room.
1 I had with him was called “Inside,” and I remember being in the studio at 4 o’clock in the morning. “A Woman’s Love,” which you do with Willie Nelson, was written by Mike Reid. He doesn’t know any better,” and and they went back on the record. He’s not a brother.” He said, “Let me tell you something. He said he called them and said, “Why’d you stop playing Ronnie’s record?” They said, “Well, you know, we’ve got his picture. They sent my PR picture out and some of the radio stations stopped playing my record, and the head of promotion told me this story years ago. 5 on the Soul Chart in 1965 on Billboard. I’ve done contemporary, country, the blues, soul. What do you say when someone asks if you’re a country singer or soul singer? There was a friend of mine, my assistant’s son, he told me all about Kacey and said, “You need to listen to her songs.” I love her stuff. She knows her audience, and she’s very hot right now. It seems like she’s got her head straight. Has she been on your radar for some time? You cut “No Getting Over Me” with Kacey Musgraves on this record. I said, “Hell, that’s gonna be good, and it was.”
Of course, I took it one time to Joe Bellati and he said, “I love the way you sing on it, but I don’t do a niche record.” I thought, “Well, are we dead on that song?” Then Billy Gibbons said he wanted to sing it with me. He said, “The writers say this might be a good song for you, ‘Southern Boys And Detroit Wheels.’” They ought to play it at every Nascar event. How did you hook up with Billy Gibbons? Do you two have a history together? Some of the choices were more surprising than others. He said, “Ronnie, I’m not used to being out here in the fast lane.” I said, “You are the fast lane. I sang “Misery Loves Company” with him, a song written by Jerry Reed and I’d recorded it years ago, and I wanted to cut that with Leon. The biggest surprise on there was Leon Russell. We got in touch with him, he came in the studio and he was really on. I can’t do that, so my producer and I were talking about wanting to do this with duets of songs that had been big for me. So you’d come out every so often with a Greatest Hits package. I knew I loved Little Big Town, so I called them and they said, “Yeah, we’d love to do it.” Most of the time when I was at RCA, they wanted a Greatest Hits Vol. Well, you kind of pick the ones you like the best out of all these new country stars. How did you decide on which artists to collaborate with for Duets ? We chatted with the North Carolina native about the new album, his gift for interpreting songs, and how Music City’s changed since his heyday. Country music luminary Ronnie Milsap returned January 18 with Duets, an album of old classics and new tunes the piano man cut with some of Nashville’s brightest stars, among them Kacey Musgraves, George Strait, and Luke Bryan.
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