Like Ralph Mooney

                                                                        LIKE RALPH MOONEY

         Millions of country music fans know Ray Turrey's music, but they probably wouldn't recognize him on the street.  Few have ever seen the reclusive musician except in  the dim lights at the back of a concert stage.  Turrey says he likes it that way.  The star, he tells us, is Ted Symons, his boss for twenty-five years.
         We met Ray Turrey in a Denny's  restaurant after a concert.  He said he had been craving a Denny's club sandwich and fries.  He had last eaten with the band at a roadside diner a few hours before the latest gig.
         Turrey selected a window booth.  He likes to look out at the night, he says.  Night has been a constant companion in his music career.  The band plays fairs and beer joints and occasional auditoriums and then tears down the freeway in its tour bus  to get to the next show.
         Turrey looks at you with smoky gray eyes.  His face is gently lined.  He says each line represents hundreds of thousands of miles crisscrossing the country on tour.  He takes pride in those miles, you can tell.
         His personal road includes two marriages and two divorces.  The marriages couldn't take the strain of constantly being on the road, he said.
         “I met Laura when I was first starting out,” he said after sipping from his glass of tea.  He offers me some French fries, but I decline.  “She was a Friday and Saturday night regular.  It took me a while to get the nerve to ask her out, but we clicked almost from the start.”
         His eyes take on the look of fog in a cold mountain pass as he thinks of his marriage.
         “Laura didn't want to go on the road,” he says.  “And she got lonely when I was gone.  I guess it's right out of a country song that she cheated on me.  I was really hurt for a while.  She got married again and it worked out.  She's still married after all these years.”
         Ray Turrey was born in Bakersfield, California, the town that gave birth to what he calls “the greatest music in the world,” the Bakersfield Sound.  It was where the music of Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart flowered and offered a distinct honky-tonk rhythm in contrast to the more polished and refined Nashville Sound.
         Turrey says he can readily identify with the songs of Merle Haggard. Turrey never went to prison, or even got into trouble much, but he identified with the wanderlust evident in songs like Haggard's “Mama Tried.”  He would lie in bed at night and hear the rumble of freight trains crossing the flat dusty expanse of Bakersfield and  dream of distant places.
         “I couldn't identify at all with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,” Turrey grins.  “No place like home didn't appeal to me at all back then.”
         Turrey's family lived in a simple clapboard house a couple of blocks from his adult mentor, Darren Randolph.  Randolph drove a big rig during the week and  on weekends played steel guitar for a local band called Sagebrush.  Turrey thought that life on the road sounded romantic and he was enchanted by the steel guitar from the very beginning.
         “Darren used to rehearse in his garage,” Turrey remembers.  “He would invite me over and his wife made lemonade.  When I heard Darren play songs from Buck Owens or Merle Haggard I thought he was the greatest steel guitar player in the world.”
         Randolph gave Turrey hands on experience playing the steel guitar and steel guitar greats like Ralph Mooney and Tom Brumley showed Turrey the way.
         “I loved Waylon Jennings,” Turrey said.  “But I thought that Ralph Mooney was as important as Waylon in the sound they created.  Mooney showed how versatile the steel guitar could be in the right hands.”
         Turrey's biggest early obstacle was being too young to legally enter the nightclubs in Bakersfield where Sagebrush played.  But he got a break when the band had  a date at a fair and Darren Randolph was on the road delivering a load.
         “They needed a steel player,” Turrey says, “and Darren was gone to New Mexico I think.  He told me I should fill in for him and I did.”
         People were impressed with the young Turrey and he was “on call” for bands who needed a steel guitarist. 
         Turrey didn't know it, but that night he filled in for Darren Randolph an up and coming singer named Ted Symons was in the audience.  Symons was also a Waylon Jennings fan and he liked the steel guitar driven sound that Ray Turrey provided.  He made a mental note to look up Turrey in a couple of years.
         In that two year period Turrey graduated from high school, played occasional gigs, and met his first wife.
         “I don't think it was just hormones with Laura and me,” Turrey says.  “She is undoubtedly one of the sexiest women I've ever met.  Even now, my heart beats faster when I think about her.  I felt a connection with her like you feel with a best friend, but more.”  He breaks off, looking embarrassed.
         “Anyway,” he continues, “we were young, too young to get married.  She got pregnant right away.  She lost the baby after three months.  Maybe that's what led to everything else.  I don't know,” he shrugs. 
         He said his relationship with his second wife Becky was like being overwhelmed by an irresistible force.
         “Becky is one of those people who just knows what she wants,” Turrey said.  “And at the time she wanted me.  Being married to a musician really appealed to her.  She liked hanging out around musicians.”
         He confesses that his feelings about Becky are not as positive as he feels about Laura.
         “No man likes to feel emasculated by a woman,” Turrey said.  “And Becky was the most emasculating woman I ever knew.  She had a way of making you feel like dirty bath water.  It was a relief when we got the final divorce decree.”
         I asked him if he saw his life reflected in his music.
         “Sure,” he says and takes another bite from his sandwich and  a French fry.  “Country music is more about real life than almost any other musical genre.  I know people joke about the drinking and cheating and prison songs, but for working class people that's the way life is.
         “The challenge is to take real life and make something artistic out of it.  I think Ted Symons has done a good job of doing that.”
         Ted Symons is five years older than his steel guitarist, but looks older than that, even by his own admission.  Symons has lived the kind of life he sings about.  The cheating, drinking, drugs, and loneliness in his songs come from personal experience. 
         “Ray is the steadiest man I know,” Symons told  me.  “It's easy to get caught up in what I call 'the life.'  It's women and booze or drugs and finally not giving much of a damn about anything.  Some guys don't even show up on time for rehearsals or shows.  But Ray is always there.  And Ray doesn't really need rehearsal.  He can play anything on a steel guitar that can be played.”
         There was a time a few years back that some Ted Symons fans thought that Ray Turrey was too prominent in the band.  Ted Symons dismisses the criticism.
         “It didn't bother me,” he said.  “Some of the country music critics made a big deal about Ray's playing.  And they should have.  Ray got as close to Ralph Mooney as anyone could, I think, and he deserved all the attention he got.”
         “Why, then,” I asked, “did your next album reduce the role of the steel guitar so dramatically?”
         “We weren't really focused on moving away from the steel guitar,” Symons said.  “We were working with some new writers and new arrangements.  When you've done something for a long time sometimes you just want to try something new.”
         “Were you disappointed when the album didn't do well?” I pressed.
         “Sure,” Symons said.  “The fans get used to a certain sound and they weren't ready for the new album, I guess.  In the past couple of years the album has done very well.  But there's no doubt that Ray is the hit of our live shows.  I learned my lesson.”
         Rumor had it that Ray Turrey was ready to quit the band when his role on the album got diminished.  “Was it true?” I asked.
         “It crossed my mind,” Turrey concedes.  “It wasn't just the way the new album was shaping up.  Years of touring take their toll.  Studio musicians make good livings without being on the road all the time.  So, yeah, I thought about it.”
         “What changed your mind?” I asked.
         Turrey looks reflective and takes a last sip of his iced tea.
         “Ted said we would do less touring and more studio stuff,” he says.  “He kept his word.  We have lots of stuff recorded that hasn't been released.
        "But the biggest thing is that this is like family.  It's the only family I've really had since I grew up.  Families fuss and fight, but they love each other.”
         He looks at me with those wise gray eyes and I know that about says it all.