Tony Ramey (known among his most loyal followers as “TR”) has always nuanced his music and songs with elements from many genres, but his latest effort (a collection due for release this January called Soul Survivor) shows him evolving into an artist who defies classification. While he is composing songs that still explore Country and Country and Western motifs (as in his Willie Nelson duet “The Bible, the Bottle, and the Gun”), soul, blues, and contemporary folk elements have begun to eclipse a style of music that most critics have labeled “traditional” (or “Throwback,” as Tony called his latest acoustic album) country.
His relocation out of Nashville finds TR drawing from his earliest influences far more obviously than he has in past albums, which were (with the exception of Places and Throwback) more snapshots of where he was as a songwriter, rather than an accurate record of his artistic journey. His early memories of music that “struck a chord,” as Tony says, recall Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, Bill Withers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jackson Brown, Ray Price, Charlie Rich, Aretha Franklin, along with a hodge podge of mainstream Country artists who put forth elements of Folk and Blues in their songs as well: “Everybody thinks of Haggard as a country artist, and I can’t disagree with that, but there’s nothin’ swampier or more R&B than the horn section on Haggard’s ‘Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink.'” TR’s newest compositions reflect his principal belief about ‘American Music:’ It isn’t confined to a certain production, theme, type of voice, etc.; rather, it is an organic, constantly morphing phenomenon that resists mass market, trendy merchandising, and influence from corporations always vying for shelf space at a local retailer or “sounds-like” lists of artists on a digital download store.Tony’s live performances have taken him from the Texas and Midwest Honky Tonks where people are two-stepping and raising their bottles, to where he says he is starting to feel even more at home–in the two-hundred-and-fifty to one-thousand seat theaters, where people come to listen to a storyteller at work. Audiences in the theaters at Tony’s performances are compelled to listen–to go down the same road together, on the same journey, wherever his song takes them. That journey ends up above the production and sonic value of a pounding track: “I want people to dance and have a good time, but there’s a romantic part of me that wants to believe it’s all derived from an honesty and passion in music that has substance and meaning, not just a loop or hip-hop beat and words that rhyme.”
With gold and platinum records on artists like Trisha Yearwood, John Michael Montgomery, George Strait, and a host of others who have covered Tony’s material, and with BMI awards and more than fifteen years of professional writing behind him, Tony has proven himself as a songwriter, but the best is yet to come for those watching and listening to Tony as he is proving himself as an artist…It will be a journey worth taking–wherever the journey takes us.
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