San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
He broke country music’s color line
DALLAS — Charley Pride, the legendary singer known for his velvet baritone and for breaking the color line in country music, died Saturday of complications related to COVID-19.
He was 86.
From 1966 until 1987, Dallasbased Pride was one of the biggest stars in country music, scoring 52 Top 10 country hits, including 29 chart-toppers.
More than a dozen of his songs crossed over to the pop charts, including “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone.”
He was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame, won four Grammys and sold an estimated 70 million records — more than anyone at RCA not named Elvis.
Pride fused traditional country music with pop leanings and sophisticated production styles,
making his records irresistible to radio programmers.
Despite his long string of hits and his rich, smooth voice, Pride perhaps was best known for being the first major Black artist in the largely alabaster world of country music.
Once called “the Jackie Robinson of country,” Pride grew tired of the never-ending questions about his skin color and preferred to talk about his music.
“They used to ask me how it feels to be the ‘first colored country singer.' 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 race-conscious, so ate-up with colors and pigments. I call it ‘skin hang-ups' — it's a disease,” he told the Morning News in 1992.
Last month, Pride collected the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, becoming the first Black artist to receive the honor since it was created in 2012.
The scaled-down version of the awards took place indoors at the Music City Center convention hall under jittery circumstances, as several artists dropped out days ahead after testing positive for COVID-19.
The Country Music Association said all stars had been tested multiple times for COVID-19 before performing.
A request for “No drama, just music,” from the Country Music Association also drew criticism from fans in a year marked by historic protests over racial inequality.
The Nov. 11 national telecast marked Pride's last performance. Rising Black country star Jimmie
Allen introduced him, saying: “Here's the truth — I might never have had a career in country music if it wasn't for a truly groundbreaking artist who took his best shot and made the best kinda history in our genre.”
Then the two sang a duet of “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'.”
“Well, you might not believe but I'm nervous as can be,” Pride said in his acceptance speech.
Charley Frank Pride was born in Sledge, Miss., on March 18, 1934. One of 11 children raised by sharecropper parents, Pride sang from an early age, but his first true talent was pitching, fielding and hitting.
As a teenager working on the farm, he dreamed of following Jackie Robinson into the major leagues: “I said, ‘Here's my way out of the cotton fields,” he told National Public Radio in 2017.
Pride left Mississippi in the 1950s to pitch in the Negro Leagues, eventually playing for teams in Memphis, Idaho, Wis., and Birmingham, Ala., where he and another player were traded in exchange for a team bus, according to Pride's 1994 autobiography, “Pride: The Charley Pride Story,” co-written with Jim Henderson.
He aimed for the majors, and even tried out with the California Angels and New York Mets, but injuries kept him out the big leagues.
With encouragement from his coaches and from country star Red Foley, Pride launched his music career while still playing baseball.
He started out modestly, performing in nightclubs around Montana, where he'd moved to play for the Missoula Timberjacks and where he later worked in construction and at a lead smelting plant.
His big break came in 1965, when he traveled to Nashville and convinced Chet Atkins to sign him to RCA Records.
His first single, “The Snakes Crawl At Night,” flopped. But in 1966, he landed a Top 10 hit and a Grammy nomination with his third single, “Just Between You And Me.”
From that point, his career skyrocketed.
For the next 20 years, Pride racked up hit after hit with songs as diverse as “Mississippi Cotton Picking Delta Town,” the reggaestyle “You're My Jamaica” and his chart-topping version of Hank Williams' “Honky Tonk Blues.” He won a gospel performance Grammy for his 1971 song “Let Me Live.”
Critics dubbed his high-sheen
country-pop sound “countrypolitan.” But Pride never tried to hide the twang and drawl in his singing voice, and he took great pride in his Southern roots.
“I'm really the epitome of American music, from gospel to blues to country, but country was the music I emulated the most,” he said.
In 1967, he became only the second Black musician to appear on the Grand Ole Opry — after harmonica player DeFord Bailey.
Two years later, with his career exploding, Pride decided he needed to move from Montana to an area with a larger airport.
While he considered heading back to the Deep South, he and his wife, Rozene, picked Dallas because it seemed more progressive. The couple lived for many years in North Dallas.
“I grew up in a segregated society, and I didn't want to subject my three kids to that,” he told the Morning News in 2017. “We picked out what we thought was the best place for the kids, and also for traveling around the world, and you couldn't find a better place for that than Dallas.”
When Pride started in Nashville, some people struggled with the concept of a Black singer performing what essentially is the music of white Southerners.
In a 2017 interview with NPR, Pride recalled a Nashville publicist telling him: “You look like them, but you sound like us.”
Yet in most interviews, Pride downplayed the role skin color played in his career and said he never was jeered or booed by white audiences.
“Whenever I tell writers that, they look at me like they think I'm lying. But why would I lie? I'm a success. It would make a real sensational story if I talked about how this person called me this and that person called me that, but it never happened. Not once,” he said.