We find necessary and sufficient conditions for a Fricke family of level N (≥2) to be primitive or totally primitive. Let K be an imaginary quadratic field of discriminant other than and . As applications of Fricke families, we show that if is sufficiently large, then the special values of a primitive Fricke family generate the ray class field modulo N over K. Moreover, we construct a primitive generator of over K in terms of the special values of classical Fricke functions for every K which would be a partial answer to a question of Hasse and Ramachandra.