Covid claims country great
I’d like to be remembered as a good person who tried to be a good entertainer and made people happy, was a good American who paid his taxes and made a good living. Charley Pride
1934-2020
Charley Pride, one of country music’s first Black superstars whose rich baritone on such hits as Kiss an Angel Good Morning helped sell millions of records and made him the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, has died. He was 86.
Pride died yesterday in Dallas of complications from Covid-19, according to close sources.
“I’m so heartbroken that one of my dearest and oldest friends, Charley Pride, has passed away. It’s even worse to know that he passed away from Covid-19. What a horrible, horrible virus. Charley, we will always love you,” Dolly Parton tweeted.
Pride sold more than 25 million records during a career that began in the mid-1960s. Hits besides Kiss an Angel Good Morning in 1971 included Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone, Burgers and Fries, Mountain of Love,
and Someone Loves You Honey.
He had three Grammy Awards, more than 30 No 1 hits between 1969 and 1984, won the Country Music Association’s Top Male Vocalist and Entertainer of the Year awards in 1972 and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000. He won the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award last month.
Ronnie Milsap called him a “pioneer” and said that without his encouragement, Milsap might have never gone to Nashville. “To hear this news tears out a piece of my heart,” he said in a statement.
Other Black country stars came before Pride, namely DeFord Bailey, who was an Grand Ole Opry member between 1927 and 1941. But until the early 1990s, when Cleve Francis came along, Pride was the only Black country singer signed to a major label. In 1993, he joined the Opry cast in Nashville.
“They used to ask me how it feels to be the first coloured country singer,” he told The Dallas Morning News in 1992. “Then it was first Negro country singer; then first black country singer. Now I’m the first African-American country singer. That’s about the only thing that’s changed. This country is so raceconscious, so ate-up with colours and pigments. I call it skin hangups — it’s a disease.” Pride was raised in Sledge, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper. He had seven brothers and three sisters.
In 2008 while accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the Mississippi Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts, Pride said he never focused on race.
“My older sister one time said, ‘Why are you singing THEIR music’?” Pride said. “But we all understand what the y’all-and-us-syndrome has been. See, I never as an individual accepted that, and I truly believe that’s why I am where I am today.”
As a young man before launching his singing career, he was a pitcher and outfielder in the Negro American League with the Memphis Red Sox and in the Pioneer League in Montana. After playing minor league baseball a couple of years, he ended up in Helena, Montana, where he worked in a zinc smelting plant by day and played country music in nightclubs at night.
Pride was part of the Texas Rangers’ ownership group for the last 10 years and the team will fly the flags at half-staff at Globe Life Field and Globe Life Park today and tomorrow in his memory.
After a tryout with the New York Mets, Pride visited Nashville and broke into country music when Chet Atkins, head of RCA Records, heard two of his demo tapes and signed him.
To ensure that Pride was judged on his music and not his race, his first few singles were sent to radio stations without a publicity photo. After his identity became known, a few country radio stations refused to play his music.
For the most part, though, Pride said he was well received.
Early in his career, he would put white audiences at ease when he joked about his “permanent tan”.
In 1994, he wrote his autobiography, Pride: The Charley Pride Story, in which he disclosed he was mildly manic depressive.
“I’d like to be remembered as a good person who tried to be a good entertainer and made people happy, was a good American who paid his taxes and made a good living,” he said in 1985.
“I tried to do my best and contribute my part.”
He is survived by his wife, Rozene, whom he married in 1956; three children, Kraig, Dion and Angela; and several grandchildren.