By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — The first man to win the Country Music Association’s male vocalist award two years in a row, one of the first Black members of the Grand Ole Opry, and one of the most successful country music singers ever, Charley Pride’s legacy befits legend in Music City. At the time of his death from complications from contracting COVID-19 at the age of 86, Pride would have 29 No. 1 country hits, 52 Top 10s, and twelve gold albums. Pride would see himself inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000, though his legacy of being country music’s first Black superstar lives on today.
Born to a sharecropper father as the fourth of 11 children on March 18, 1934, Pride grew up during southern segregation in a shotgun shack on a 40-acre cotton farm along the Mississippi Delta in a town named Sledge. Pride said when he was younger, he imagined himself getting off the farm; during that time he bought his first guitar and began to sing at the age of 14. He would get his first break to a better life at the age of 16 through baseball when Pride landed a spot on the Negro League Memphis Red Sox, after which he had brief stints with several different baseball leagues.
“I used to sit on the porch, and I’d look up at the clouds. And I said, ‘Boy how’d it be to float on them clouds?’” Pride said in the Ken Burns documentary Country Music. “And I’d think of that, you know, when I was little. So, when I saw Jackie Robinson go to the major leagues, I said, ‘There’s my way out of the cotton field.’”
While playing for the semi-pro team in Montana, the East Helena Smelteries, Pride began performing at local bars. He moved to Music City soon after, where he got a break when his deep, resonant voice caught the attention of producer Cowboy Jack Clement, who then began recording Pride in a studio with Nashville’s top musicians. Afterward, Clement and Pride’s manager had difficulty finding a label that would feature their new professionally produced recordings.
Finally, in 1966, Chet Atkins convinced RCA to set aside racial politics and feature the artist based on the strength of his singing. When Pride’s first singles were released, RCA did not mention his race, and his early publicity photos were withheld, leaving audiences to be so surprised when seeing for the first time live, that they largely fell silent.
“You could drop a pin,” Pride said on Country Music. “I’d say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I realize it’s kind of unique, me coming out here on a country music show wearing this permanent tan.’ The minute I said that, big applause. I guess they said, ‘Well – let’s sit back and see what he’s got to offer.’ Once they heard me sing, (they said), ‘I don’t care if he’s green. I like his singing.”’
That year, Pride’s career took off when “Just Between You and Me” reached No.10 in the country charts. The hit was followed up soon after with what would be his biggest release “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” which would spend five weeks at the top of the country charts and launch into the pop market. Once Pride’s foot was officially in the music industry’s door, the success of his hit-heavy heyday spanned from 1966 through the 1980s. In 2020 Pride would receive that year’s Country Music Association’s Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award on November 11, just before his death on December 12 of that year in Dallas, TX.
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