Charley Pride
“I always think about Charley Pride. It would’ve been so easy for me to never hear his name if I didn’t have someone in my life invested in talking about the history of people of color in country and roots music,” she adds. “It would’ve been so easy for me to miss his music… after a while, one can’t help but think that’s purposeful.” - Yola
Raised in the segregated South as the son of a sharecropper, Charley Frank Pride was born on a forty-acre cotton farm in Sledge, Mississippi, fifty miles south of Memphis. He spent his childhood laboring in fields, playing baseball, and listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a Philco radio. Pride’s father was a big fan of the Grand Ole Opry, and Pride was musically schooled on the likes of Roy Acuff, Pee Wee King, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams. Pride bought his first guitar when he was fourteen and began developing a style of singing that would come to impress his heroes.
“What came from my throat was my voice, no one else’s,” he wrote in his autobiography. “No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another — I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.”
"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?” 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 racial prejudice may have hindered an easy interchange among listeners and performers of different races and inhibited and even prevented African Americans from attending live country music performances in any venue, it could not prevent the young Charley Pride or Ray Charles from listening to the Grand Ole Opry on their battery-powered radios.
Yet for one brief moment, it seemed like a revolution was in the offing. This was marked by the emergence of Charley Pride as something much greater than a token or an anomaly.
For many years, Pride was RCA’s biggest-selling country artist. He wasn’t a country singer who happened to be Black, he was a Black country artist who had hits, appeared all over the world, and didn’t (at least once he became a success) downgrade his Blackness.
Pride wasn’t exactly a poster boy for the Black Panthers, but he didn’t hesitate to let anyone know he’d grown up in the South, was proud of his heritage, and hadn’t surrendered any racial loyalty or esteem by opting to sing country songs.
Charley Pride was the first black member of the Grand Ole Opry since DeFord Bailey decades earlier; the first black artist to have a number one country record; and the first artist of any race to win the Country Music Association’s male vocalist award two years in a row. One of the most successful country singers ever, he would go on to have 29 No. 1 country hits, 52 Top 10s, and twelve gold albums.
Charley Pride was not afraid to embrace the music he loved and to stake his career on his singular talent and devotion. Luckily for him, and for all of us, he found a large and enthusiastic audience ready to return that devotion.
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