It was just last month that country music pioneer Charley Pride was honored at the CMA Awards. Saturday, at 86, he was one of the more than 298,000 Americans who have died from Covid complications.
In his time, Pride scored more than 50 Top 10 country singles, 40 of which went to No. 1. Before the special CMA Award, he was a three-time Grammy winner, he got the lifetime achievement award in 2017.
Born in Sledge, Miss., Pride came to music after a stint in the Negro Leagues after which he failed being signed to the majors.
“There was a certain point where things are not for you and I think that was part of it,” Pride told me last year when he was doing interviews in connection with an “American Masters” profile of him on PBS.
The son of a sharecropper, he listened to all kinds of music, he said, but “Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys, that was my dad’s favorite entertainer. He called every shot. Whatever he wanted to listen to on the radio, that’s what we listened to. What I wanted to listen to didn’t make any difference, so I settled on listening to Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb and all the early ones.
“But anyway, that’s what I settled on,” Pride said. My mother bought me a guitar from Sears Roebuck.”
While still playing minor league ball in Montana, he started appearing on local stages singing the old country songs he had heard on the radio in Mississippi. He recalled a neighbor there who told him: “Have you ever thought you’re not on this planet to play baseball, you’re on this planet to sing?” So, Pride said, “after all these years, I finally accepted it.”
With hits like “Kiss an Angel This Mornin,’” “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” and “All I Have to Offer You is Me,” Pride’s success came in part from not addressing the color of his skin, which was an issue in places of the country where country music was most popular.
Pride often spoke about opening a big package tour for Ralph Emery in 1966, when people knew his hits but maybe didn’t know what he looked like.
Getting a startled reaction early in the tour, he recalled, he would announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, I realize it’s a very unique, me coming out here on a country music show having this permanent tan,” he said. “I ain’t got time to talk about our pigments. I got only 10 minutes. I’m going to do my three songs. And if I have time, I’ll do maybe a Hank Williams song.”
The crowd warmed to him then, especially after hearing his smooth voice.
Pride may have been a trailblazer for every African-American country singer who followed him, but, Pride told me later, “I didn’t go into this business to do that, like Jackie Robinson did. There’s a difference there.”
“My thing was: It wasn’t about all of this,” Pride told reporters. “Once I come out and start singing, it didn’t make any difference whether I was pink. They wanted to hear me sing again. So that’s the way my career has been all these years.”