Charley Pride, first major Black star in country music, dies at 86
IN the early 1960s, a young minor league baseball pitcher and aspiring country singer named Charley Pride had settled into a discouraging routine. His days were spent toiling in Helena, Mont., at a smelter operated by the Anaconda Mining Co., and he spent his free time playing for its semipro baseball team, the East Helena Smelterites.
He stood out as an African American working in a musical genre that seldom welcomed black voices. But he developed a small but enthusiastic fan base singing in singing in Montana honky tonks, which in 1962 led to his invitation to perform before a show headlined by country singers Red Sovine and Red Foley.
After Pride sang ‘Heartaches By the Numbers’ and ‘Lovesick Blues,’ Sovine, a veteran performer, was struck by Pride’s magnetism and the enthusiastic response he evoked from the White audience. He suggested that Pride take his chances in Nashville, Tenn.
It took him nearly two years to get a contract. Record executives loved his demo tapes but got cold feet after viewing his picture. In one audition, he was told, ‘Now sing in your regular voice.’ A talent scout even suggested that Pride sell himself as a novelty by dressing in Colonial garb and adopting the stage name of George Washington Carver III. Finally, country guitarist Chet Atkins, who was also an RCA Records executive, saw promise in the singer.
Radio stations received his first singles, credited to Country Charley Pride, without publicity photos – a cautious move by Atkins. Disc jockeys latched onto the records, and country fans listened. “It was RCA’s decision not to play up or down the color thing, but to just let the voice go, put the record out and let the people decide,” Pride later told The Washington Post.
Pride, who grew up in the Mississippi cotton fields and become the first major African American singing star in country music, died Dec 12 at 86 in Dallas. The cause was complications from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to a statement from the Nashville public relations firm 2911 Media.
Harmonica player DeFord Bailey, who was black, had been one of the earliest and most popular cast members of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1930s. A generation later, soul stars Ray Charles and Solomon Burke recorded country songs. But Pride shattered a show-business barrier, paving the way for subsequent black entertainers – Stoney Edwards, Big Al Downing and Darius Rucker, among them – who followed Pride’s lead in Nashville.
Country-music historian Rich Kienzle said Pride embraced a traditional sound: recording with fiddles and steel guitar in an era when many country singers were trying to sound like Las Vegas entertainers. Onstage, he also liked to defuse tension with self-deprecating, sometimes selfdemeaning humor.
“He would make jokes to audiences about having a ‘permanent tan,’” Kienzle said. “The music won out over any bigotry.”
With 51 Top 10 hits on the Billboard country charts between 1966 and 1984, Pride was one of the genre’s most popular and durable performers. He sang of hoboing and hitchhiking on ‘The Atlantic Coastal Line’ (1966) and ‘Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone?’(1970), adultery on ‘The Snakes Crawl at Night’ (1966) and heartbreak on ‘Just Between You and Me’ (1966) – and brought a pained believability to each.
The biographical song ‘Mississippi Cotton Picking Delta Town’ (1974), written for Pride by Harold Dorman and Wiley Gann, evoked his hardscrabble youth – ‘I’ve picked cotton till my fingers hurt/ Draggin’ a sack through the delta dirt’ – and the restlessness that compelled him to leave: “One dusty street to walk up and down/ Nothing much to do but hang around/ In a Mississippi cotton pickin’ delta town.”
Pride’s greatest success was a paean to romantic contentment, ‘Kiss an Angel Good Morning’ (1971), a song written by Ben Peters, which appeared on the pop charts for four months. In the 1971 film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel ‘Sometimes a Great Notion,’ Pride sang ‘All His Children,’ a quasi-country gospel song co-written by Henry Mancini.
He often turned down songs that he believed were too controversial. One such song, ‘Blackjack County Chain,’ by songwriter Red Lane, recounted a chain gang beating a sadistic sheriff to death. After Pride rejected it, his frequent touring mate, Willie Nelson, later recorded it.
Pride often endured cruel jokes and taunts from fellow entertainers. George Jones once drunkenly painted ‘KKK’ on Pride’s car. (Pride had passed out at a party while trying to match Jones, an alcoholic, drink for drink.)
Early in his recording career, Pride’s manager, Jack Johnson, set up a private jam session with singer Faron Young, coowner of a widely read trade journal Music City News. Young, known for badgering colleagues with profanity and provocative insults, praised Pride’s singing but referred to him with a racial epithet.