Southern Pride reluctant pioneer
The first African-American country music superstar is headed to New Zealand. Grant Smithies hunkers down to chat with Charley Pride before his visit.
If Charley Pride starts to tell a story, you better buckle in for the ride. It might pay to have a few snacks on hand too, in case you get peckish.
I’m not exaggerating. Saying that this country music legend talks a lot is akin to observing that the ocean is a little damp.
He goes and goes and, in the end, you have to admire his energy, even as you struggle to lob the occasional fresh question into a slender gap in the passing verbiage.
One of 11 children born to poor share-croppers in rural Mississippi, Pride is in his adopted home state of Texas when I call at the appointed time.
After I’ve been chatting for a while to a couple of promoters and managers with splendid southern manners, Pride finally comes on the line, apologising for having gone to the wrong room. Then we’re off.
‘‘New Zealand! It’s a long way down there!’’ he says, his deep tone and aw-shucks rural accent precisely what a movie producer would be looking for if they needed an actor to play an old-school southern country singer.
‘‘But they don’t come to us, so we have to go to them! I came on down there in the 70s and made all these fans in New Zealand, so I got to keep comin’ down to them, you know? I started comin’ down in 72 or 74 and came a bunch since then.’’
He’s coming again in March, hence this call.
The 84-year-old music veteran also has a new album out, and the fact that he’s been singing country music for an awfully long time is right there in the title: 50 Golden Years of Pride.
‘‘Yeah, 50 years! Imagine that. And we’ll be doing a lot of those songs on the show. I got four or five signature songs, and we wrap others around those to suit the mood.’’
Pride has sold a staggering 71 million albums worldwide, won three Grammys, and hit the No 1 spot on the Country charts 41 times.
His almost pathologically sincere baritone even made it as far as Whanganui, with Mississippi
Cotton Pickin’ Delta Town and Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’ in high rotation on local radio station 2ZW when I was growing up in the 1970s.
What makes a good country song? Same things that make a good song of any other kind, he says.
‘‘I’m in the business of selling lyrics, feelings and emotions. That’s why people keep coming back to see me. Now, Grant, here’s the deal. Every song, whether it’s rock or pop or whatever, they got lyrics too, of course, but country music really sells the feeling behind those lyrics, and the music sits on back behind the words a bit so you can take ’em in. We don’t let the music drown out the lyrics.’’ A little twist of sadness helps, of course. ‘‘There’s heartache in there sometimes, for sure. A country song might make you cry, but you’ll feel good afterwards. Whoever I can find that don’t like music – well, there’s something wrong with that person! That person needs some kinda help, because music is a beautiful thing. You can find a country song to fit almost any mood you might be in. That’s my thinkin’ on the matter.’’
Now consider this – Charley Pride was the first African-American country music superstar. He was, and remains, a proud black man singing down-home sentimental songs to a predominantly white audience, many of whom still hold conservative and unenlightened attitudes on matters of race.
Even so, his skill got him over the line. In his heyday in the 1970s, Pride was the biggest-selling RCA Records artist since Elvis.
‘‘Oh, yeah! I been from the bottom to the top. I been pickin’ cotton, ploughing with mules, workin’ construction. Earlier on, I was pulling weeds around the hogs before I walked four miles to school and four miles back. Now I got three Grammys and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I used to shovel coal from trains on to a belt that fed up into a furnace at a smelter! I don’t want to go back there, is all I’m saying.’’
No. And Pride didn’t want to be a singer either, not at first anyway. He was a gifted athlete as a young man, and wanted to smack fast-travelling baseballs way out into the outfield for a living.
Between 1952 and 1958, he played for the Louisville Clippers, Birmingham Black Barons
"Earlier on, I was pulling weeds around the hogs before I walked four miles to school and four miles back. Now I got three Grammys and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I used to shovel coal from trains on to a belt that fed up into a furnace at a smelter! I don’t want to go back there, is all I’m saying.’’ Charley Pride
and Memphis Red Sox.
At one stage, Pride and fellow pitcher
Jesse Mitchell were swapped out to a new team in exchange for a secondhand tour bus.
‘‘Jesse and I may have the distinction of being the only players in history to be traded for a used motor vehicle,’’ Pride writes in his 1994 autobiography.
‘‘My intention was to join a major baseball league and break all the previous records set by humans before I was 35,’’ he tells me.
‘‘But then I would get up on stage sometimes and people would say, ‘Charley, you sing pretty good. You’re getting two dollars a day eatin’ money and a hundred dollars a month playing baseball, and you’d make a lot more money singing’.’’
Eventually, Pride surrendered to the inevitable. A life on the stage beckoned, and his early records started to gain a little traction, but to really break through he had to make a name for himself in some of the most conservative music venues in the land.
Promoters loved his voice, Pride tells me, but they worried the audience might balk at a black man singing country.
‘‘They wanted to book me, but they were afraid. The situation was unique. They were sceptical something bad might happen, and that it was a little bit early for this sort of situation.’’
At this point, Pride embarks upon an epic tale of his early years, trying to get conservative white concert promoters to give him a shot.
Now, I mean epic. This story is so long in the telling that I grow a long grey beard between the opening and closing sentences.
In the time it takes Mr Pride to tell this story, I imagine entire species have undergone the process of evolution on some distant bush-clad island.
But it’s a good story. It involves Pride’s manager Jack Johnson trying to land him a showcase gig at a famous country venue called J D’s in Arizona.
The owner is afraid, so Pride gets on the blower and talks to the man himself.
In telling the story, Pride even tries to remember this ancient phone number before giving me each part of the three-way conversation between himself, his manager and the distant promoter.
The long and short of it – eventually the promoter agrees, so long as the show goes ahead with zero advance advertising.
Pride takes the gig. Eighty people turn up for his first show.
‘‘The promoter was nervous as could be, but when time came for me to walk out on stage, the show was wonderful! There weren’t no hooting or booing. After people got over the shock, it went great!’’
Word gets around about the new kid with the great voice. By the second night, the audience swells to 800.
‘‘The owner went out and put my name on the marquee after that!’’ he crows, and I swear I can hear him slapping his thigh.
Before you know it, Pride is playing gigs alongside bluegrass legend Bill Munro, and getting performance advice from ‘‘The Hillbilly Heartthrob’’, Faron Young.
His shows start packing out. In the audience for subsequent nights are assorted excellently named country music bigwigs, he tells me, including Smokey Smith from Des Moines, Iowa, Lucky Moller from Nashville, Tennessee, and Chet Atkins’ brother-in-law, Jethro.
Charley Pride was on his way.
Now he looks back over a long career in which he wouldn’t change a thing. ‘‘I been doin’ this a long time, and I still love it.
‘‘I got the call to play for Obama a few years back, you know. Actually, I been involved with seven presidents, in one way or another.’’
Even after all this time, he’s still one of only three African-American performers to have been inducted into Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. He is, however, proud to have played his part in broadening the diversity of country audiences.
‘‘Black audiences had heard country, of course, but they follow it more now since I’ve been in the business. More have come across to country music. Early on, they mostly followed the blues. I’m from a blues state, you know. I come from Mississippi, the same place as Muddy Waters and BB King, so people always ask – how you end up in country music? You s’posed to be singin’ blues!’’ Pride’s answer? Blame my dad.
‘‘My daddy listened to country and gospel music on the radio, and that’s what I grew up with, so that’s what I sang myself.’’
At this point, a record company publicist comes on the line telling us to wrap it up. Mr Pride has another interview waiting. He sounds amused to be cut short, just when he has a serious flow on.
‘‘They told me I only had 15 minutes, and I said – you know very well it’s gonna be more than 15 minutes, whoever I talk to! It takes longer’n that to tell one story!’’
Like I say, it’s a good story, though. Pride has spent most of his singing career as the odd one out, and underneath all the politeness and warmth, it clearly riles him somewhat.
He’d rather be remembered for his talent than celebrated as the first African-American country star. That was just a fact of birth, which threw up a few extra challenges for him to overcome.
‘‘There’s always us and them, right? Like – he looks like them, but he sounds like us! Reporters will say, ‘So Charley, how does it feel to be the first coloured country singer, or the first AfricanAmerican country singer, or the first negro country singer, or the first black country singer?’ My answer is always the same. I don’t feel no different, whatever terms you want to use.
‘‘It’s the voice. That’s the important thing! People love my phrasing, and the emotion I can get into my lyrics. I’m a staunch American, and I’m a singer. That’s it.’’