Final farewells

One bright spot in the eulogies from the past year commemorating the country singer Ray Price, the flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía, and the electric blues-rocker Johnny Winter was the news that each musician had completed a final album before his demise.

Those recordings have now been released. And each reveals a good deal about how each man regarded his remaining responsibilities both to himself and to his audience.

In some ways, Johnny Winter’s Step Back (Megaforce) is the saddest—not because it’s mournful (which, despite the inclusion of Son House’s “Death Letter,” it isn’t) or because it finds Winter in decline (it doesn’t). It’s sad because, like his 2011 album Roots, it finds him capitalizing on the rejuvenation that he’d just begun deriving from having finally kicked drugs, alcohol, and parasitic professional management.

The renewal has little to do with the material (which from “Who Do You Love” to “Blue Monday” seldom strays from the bluesman boilerplate) or the guitar cameos by Eric Clapton, Billy Gibbons, Joe Perry, Leslie West, Joe Bonamassa, and the album’s producer Paul Nelson.

What makes Step Back sound more like a beginning than a denouement is its variety of tempos (younger Winter was all hairpin curves taken at breakneck speeds) and Winter’s roughed-up, 70-year-old voice. No longer able to holler every lyric as if his vocals were an extension of his guitar, he seems to be pondering, or at least considering, the meaning of what he was singing. If his “Unchain My Heart” doesn’t rival Ray Charles’, it certainly rivals Joe Cocker’s.

Had Winter lived to be deprived of his digital dexterity by, say, arthritis, he might’ve gone on to surprise everyone, himself included, by turning heads as a singer.

The same cannot be said of Paco de Lucía, whose “voice” inhered solely in the rhythms and melodies that his fingers coaxed from his guitars. Judging from his fully engaged playing on Canción Andaluza (Universal Spain), it’s hard to believe that, at 66, he even so much as suspected that his end was drawing nigh.

Judging from the material, however, perhaps he did. A collection of eight coplas hailing from the decades in which de Lucía was born and growing up, Canción Andaluza represents the kind of artistic coming full circle that has on more than one occasion been known to portend finality.

It also recalls the truth that unless a seed falls to the earth and dies, it cannot bear fruit. Under no less arresting a circumstance than de Lucía’s passing would such emotionally suggestive songs as “Zambra Gitana” (featuring the vocals of Parrita), “Señorita” (featuring the vocals of Oscar de Leon), “Ojos Verdes,” and “Maria de la O” (featuring, like the majority, de Lucía’s guitar) come to the attention of such a vast and benighted public.

Unique among these swan songs is Ray Price’s Beauty Is … The Final Sessions (AmeriMonte). Unlike Winter and de Lucía, Price, having been assured at 87 that his battle with cancer was lost, knew that he was making—age-thickened voice and all—his last recording.

The knowledge that he knew makes much that’s maudlin about the album touchingly sweet, especially since Price is essentially bidding adieu to his wife of 30-plus years. “If God would only grant the right to turn back time,” he sings in “I Can See You,” “I’d turn and find you there.”

“This thou perceivest,” wrote Shakespeare, “which makes thy love more strong / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” Price knew exactly what he meant.