Southern Pride reluctant pioneer
The first African-American country music superstar is headed to New Zealand. Grant Smithies hunkers down to chat with Charley Pride before his visit.
If Charley Pride starts to tell a story, you better buckle in for the ride. It might pay to have a few snacks on hand too, in case you get peckish. I’m not exaggerating. Saying that this country music legend talks a lot is akin to observing that the ocean is a little damp.
He goes and goes and, in the end, you have to admire his energy, even as you struggle to lob the occasional fresh question into a slender gap in the passing verbiage.
One of 11 children born to poor share-croppers in rural Mississippi, Pride is in his adopted home state of Texas when I call at the appointed time.
After I’ve been chatting for a while to a couple of promoters and managers with splendid southern manners, Pride finally comes on the line, apologising for having gone to the wrong room. Then we’re off.
‘‘New Zealand! It’s a long way down there!’’ he says, his deep tone and aw-shucks rural accent precisely what a movie producer would be looking for if they needed an actor to play an old-school southern country singer.
‘‘But they don’t come to us, so we have to go to them! I came on down there in the 70s and made all these fans in New Zealand, so I got to keep comin’ down to them, you know? I started comin’ down in 72 or 74 and came a bunch since then.’’
He’s coming again in March, hence this call.
The 84-year-old music veteran also has a new album out, and the fact that he’s been singing country music for an awfully long time is right there in the title: 50 Golden Years of Pride.
‘‘Yeah, 50 years! Imagine that. And we’ll be doing a lot of those songs on the show. I got four or five signature songs, and we wrap others around those to suit the mood.’’
Pride has sold a staggering 71 million albums worldwide, won three Grammys, and hit the No 1 spot on the Country charts 41 times.
His almost pathologically sincere baritone even made it as far as Whanganui, with Mississippi Cotton Pickin’ Delta Town and Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’ in high rotation on local radio station 2ZW when I was growing up in the 1970s.
What makes a good country song? Same things that make a good song of any other kind, he says.
‘‘I’m in the business of selling lyrics, feelings and emotions. That’s why people keep coming back to see me. Now, Grant, here’s the deal. Every song, whether it’s rock or pop or whatever, they got lyrics too, of course, but country music really sells the feeling behind those lyrics, and the music sits on back behind the words a bit so you can take ’em in. We don’t let the music drown out the lyrics.’’ A little twist of sadness helps, of course. ‘‘There’s heartache in there sometimes, for sure. A country song might make you cry, but you’ll feel good afterwards. Whoever I can find that don’t like music – well, there’s something wrong with that person! That person needs some kinda help, because music is a beautiful thing. You can find a country song to fit almost any mood you might be in. That’s my thinkin’ on the matter.’’
Now consider this – Charley Pride was the first African-American country music superstar. He was, and remains, a proud black man singing down-home sentimental songs to a predominantly white audience, many of whom still hold conservative and unenlightened attitudes on matters of race.
Even so, his skill got him over the line. In his heyday in the 1970s, Pride was the biggest-selling RCA Records artist since Elvis.
‘‘Oh, yeah! I been from the bottom to the top. I been pickin’ cotton, ploughing with mules, workin’ construction. Earlier on, I was pulling weeds around the hogs before I walked four miles to school and four miles back. Now I got three Grammys and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I used to shovel coal from trains on to a belt that fed up into a furnace at a smelter! I don’t want to go back there, is all I’m saying.’’
No. And Pride didn’t want to be a singer either, not at first anyway. He was a gifted athlete as a young man, and wanted to smack fast-travelling baseballs way out into the outfield for a living.
Between 1952 and 1958, he played for the Louisville Clippers, Birmingham Black Barons and Memphis Red Sox.
At one stage, Pride and fellow pitcher
Jesse Mitchell were swapped out to a new team in exchange for a secondhand tour bus.
‘‘Jesse and I may have the distinction of being the only players in history to be traded for a used motor vehicle,’’ Pride writes in his
1994 autobiography.
‘‘My intention was to join a major baseball league and break all the previous records set by humans before I was 35,’’ he tells me.
‘‘But then I would get up on stage sometimes and people would say, ‘Charley, you sing pretty good. You’re getting two dollars a day eatin’ money and a hundred dollars a month playing baseball, and you’d make a lot more money singing’.’’
Eventually, Pride surrendered to the inevitable. A life on the stage beckoned, and his early records started to gain a little traction, but to really break through he had to make a name for himself in some of the most conservative music venues in the land.
Promoters loved his voice, Pride tells me, but
CHARLEY PRIDE TOUR DATES:
Saturday, March 23: Christchurch Town Hall
Sunday, March 24: Regent Theatre, Dunedin
Tuesday, March 26: Claudelands Arena, Hamilton