First major black country performer
CHARLEY PRIDE was the storied singer known for his velvet baritone and for breaking the colour line in country music.
He died on December 12 of complications related to Covid19. He was 86.
From 1966 until 1987, Dallasbased Pride was one of the biggest stars in country music, scoring 52 top10 country hits, including 29 charttoppers.
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, a regular performer in Dunedin on his visits to Australasia, 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 baritone voice, he is perhaps 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 neverending questions about his skin colour and preferred to talk about his music.
‘‘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 AfricanAmerican country singer’. That’s about the only thing that’s changed. This country is so raceconscious.’’
In November, Pride collected the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, becoming the first black artist to receive the honour since it was created in 2012.
The 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’.
Charley Frank Pride was born in Sledge, Mississippi on March 18, 1934. One of 11 children raised by sharecropper parents, Pride sang from an early age, but his first true talent was baseball.
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, Wisconsin and Birmingham, Alabama, where he and another player were traded in exchange for a team bus, according to Pride’s 1994 autobiography, Pride: The Charley Pride Story, cowritten 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 had 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 travelled 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 charttopping version of Hank Williams’ Honky Tonk Blues. He won a gospel performance Grammy for his 1971 song, Let Me Live.
Critics dubbed his highsheen countrypop 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 told The News.
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 wife Rozene picked Dallas because it seemed more progressive. The couple lived for many years in a sprawling home 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 News in 2017. ‘‘We picked out what we thought was the best place for the kids, and also for travelling 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 is essentially 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 colour played in his career and said he was never 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 told The News.
Pride scored his biggest hit in 1971 with the millionselling Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’, which crossed over to No 21 on the pop charts and introduced him to a whole new audience. That same year, he won CMA awards for Entertainer of the Year and Top Male Vocalist.
After more than two decades of dominating the charts, Pride parted ways with RCA in the 1980s, and scored his last hit with 1989’s Moody Woman. Like many ageing country legends, he spoke out about an industry obsessed with young stars.
‘‘Country music is becoming more like pop music all the time. They play the same 20 records over and over. Here I am, singing better than ever, and I can’t even get a record deal,’’ he told The News in 1992.
Pride never stopped performing and continued to put out new albums and tour into his 80s.
‘‘When you go onstage and you got a whole audience singing backup to every word of your song, it’s one of those things that gets in your blood. You just love it, and it’s hard to stop.’’ — The Dallas Morning News