Honey-voiced singer overcame prejudice to become first black country music star
If you were growing up in the segregated Deep South and were black and musically inclined, you had two choices – sing the blues or play jazz. Charley Pride was the exception that proved the rule. With his warm and smooth baritone voice, he chose to sing country, the whitest form of American music, beloved of conservative-minded rednecks.
Pride, who has died from Covid-19 aged 86, overcame appalling prejudice to score 30 No 1 hits on the country chart and become the brightest, and for a long time the only, black star in country music. Signed to RCA Records, he became the label’s second-biggest-selling artist after Elvis
Presley and won a trio of Grammy awards.
His success was hard won.
When the
Nashville veteran Jack Clement was commissioned to produce Pride’s first recording session, he booked the backing musicians with the words, ‘‘I’m fixin’ to cut a record with this n ..... , are you free?’’
Pride’s first single, a dark, tense song called The Snakes Crawl At Night, about a man who shoots his cheating wife, was sent to radio stations in 1966 under the name Country Charley Pride and with no biographical details or photo, a deliberate ploy so that disc jockeys assumed he was white. Among the music industry figures who knew he was not, Pride recalled repeatedly hearing the refrain, ‘‘Looks like them, sounds like us.’’
At his first big show after his debut hit, few of the 10,000 audience realised he was black until he walked on stage. He defused the potential shock by joking about his ‘‘permanent tan’’ and throughout his career he was at pains to play down the racial divide.
‘‘In this country, there are certain things you just don’t mention, because it just ain’t good for you,’’ he explained. ‘‘Most of the time I back off and see if I can find another way other than confrontation. It’s the way I’ve lived my whole life.’’
As his star rose, he met and sang for every American president since Gerald Ford, with the exception of Donald Trump. George W Bush was a particular fan and paid gracious tribute. At times Pride was perhaps a little over-eager to please, and some of his songs, such as America the Great, were overstuffed with patriotic bromides.
Yet while he broke down barriers on a personal level, he remained the only black country singer signed to a leading label until Cleve Francis came along in the 1990s.
It meant that despite his repeated insistence that ‘‘I’m no colour, I’m just Charley Pride, the man’’, he could never entirely shake off being defined by his skin. To his irritation, the only thing that he noticed changing over the years was the terminology of race. ‘‘They used to ask me how it feels to be the ‘first coloured country singer’,’’ he complained. ‘‘Then it was ‘first Negro country singer’ and then ‘first black country singer.’ Now I’m the ‘first AfricanAmerican country singer’. This country is so ate-up with colours and pigments. I call it ‘skin hangups’. It’s a disease.’’
Asked about the Black Lives Matter protests, he replied: ‘‘I didn’t choose to do it that way. I did it by singing, showing my talent.’’ His own preference for how posterity should remember him made no mention of being a trailblazer for his race. He wanted to be known simply as ‘‘a good person who tried to be a good entertainer and was a good American who paid his taxes’’.
Nevertheless he accepted it as an honour when the Smithsonian acquired from him a pair of his boots and one of his guitars for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
He is survived by Rozene, his wife of 64 years, their two sons Kraig and Dion, who are both musicians, and daughter Angela, a businesswoman. For more than half a century Pride made his home in Dallas, where he built an eight-bedroom house and invested his fortune wisely, with holdings in a Texas bank and the Texas Rangers baseball team.
He refused to move to Nashville, the country music capital, because it was 400km north of where he grew up under Mississippi’s Jim Crow laws. ‘‘We didn’t want to subject the kids to what we had to go through,’’ he said. ‘‘We figured if we moved to Nashville, it’d be no different and we’d have to try to get them to adjust to all that stuff.’’
His final appearance came last month at a Country Music Association awards ceremony where he received a lifetime achievement award.
Charley Frank Pride was born in Sledge, Mississippi, the fourth of 11 children. His parents were impoverished sharecroppers and had intended to name him Charl but for a clerical error on his birth certificate.
As a boy he picked cotton and, although he heard blues and R’n’B music, he was more attracted to country singers such as Hank Williams, whom he heard in radio broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry. His mother bought him his first guitar from a Sears catalogue when he was 14, yet his first ambition was to play baseball.
He enjoyed several years as a pitcher in the ‘‘Negro league’’ and minor league and, after being drafted into the US Army in 1956, played in a team that won the All Army championship. Ultimately his baseball career was sidelined by injury and he ended his playing days with a semi-pro team attached to a smelting plant in Montana, where he took a job shovelling coal.
It was also the inadvertent start of his singing career, when he was paid $10 to perform for 15 minutes at games before the East Helena Smelterites took the field.
He was heard by the established country stars Red Sovine and Red Foley, who were passing through, and recommended to Chet Atkins, head of RCA’s country music division in Nashville.
After a spectacular run of hits, he left RCA in the 1980s and went through a troubled period in which he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was committed to a psychiatric ward. He recovered and was still recording and performing into his eighties.
‘‘We’re not colour-blind yet,’’ he wrote in his autobiography Pride: the Charley Pride
Story. ‘‘But we’ve advanced a few paces along the path and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.’’ –
‘‘ This country is so ate-up with colours and pigments. I call it ‘skin hangups’. It’s a disease.’’