Vince Gill on "Healing Hands of Time"
One by Willie
John Spong
4.6 • 898 Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Vince Gill—a 21-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist, and honkytonk historian—talks about “Healing Hands of Time.” It’s a song Willie’s cut several times, but Vince focuses on the version from 1976’s The Sound in Your Mind, before getting into the power of an irresistible first line in a lyric, the seminal role in country music history played by Willie and his old friend Ray Price, and why writing a song that helps people through a hard time—like “Healing Hands” and Vince’s own “Go Rest High on that Mountain”—matters so much more than having a #1 hit.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Texas Monthly. |
| 0:11.2 | Hey there, I'm John Spong with Texas Monthly magazine, and this is One by Willie, |
| 0:16.1 | a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song that they really love. |
| 0:23.1 | This week, we talk with 21-time Grammy winner and country music hall of famer Vince Gill about healing hands of time. |
| 0:30.7 | It's one of those songs that Willie is recorded repeatedly through his career, most notably on the 1976 follow-up to Red-Headed Stranger, The Sound in Your Mind, |
| 0:40.2 | but it was also covered in 1968 by Ray Price, and Vince himself also recently recorded it |
| 0:46.1 | for a Ray Price tribute record. He's working on with Steele Guitar Virtuoso Paul Franklin. |
| 0:51.0 | It's a deeply spiritual song, almost hymnal, and it gets Vince talking about the singular |
| 0:56.2 | ability of a great song to help people who are grieving. But it'll also get into Ray Price's |
| 1:01.1 | contributions, not just to Willie's career, but to country music history. And then he'll talk about |
| 1:06.2 | how trying to harmonize with Willie in the recording studio is a lot like working hard math. So let's do it. |
| 1:12.6 | It's hard. |
| 1:14.6 | They're working while I'm missing you. So let's kick it off. those healing hands of time |
| 1:28.3 | So let's kick it off with healing hands of time. |
| 1:33.5 | Do you know which version is the one you came to first |
| 1:37.5 | or the one that we ought to at least start on? |
| 1:40.0 | Well, I would probably venture to say the Ray Price version. |
| 2:00.2 | Okay. In that... Well, I would probably venture to say the Ray Price version, you know, in that, in the process of making a tribute record to Ray of sort with my longtime friend, Paul Franklin, we did a Bakersfield record together where we did half Merle Haggard and half Buck Owens. And we just both have a deep, deep love for all that music from that great stretch of time. |
| 2:08.9 | And as I was going through songs of Rays, I didn't go for the obvious Ray Price songs, the ones that were the most popular. |
| 2:17.5 | And I wouldn't say Healing Hands of Time is one of the more popular Ray Price songs. |
| 2:23.1 | But knowing Willie wrote it and I just loved it, and the steel guitar gets featured very prominently in it. |
| 2:31.1 | And he just had a, you know, he had a great way of writing lyrics, you know, |
... |
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