Charley Pride

Charley Pride (born March 18, 1934, Sledge, Mississippi, U.S.—died December 12, 2020, Dallas, Texas) was an American country music singer who broke new ground in the 1960s by becoming the most successful African American star that the field had known to date and a significant next-generation standard bearer for the hard-core honky-tonk country music sound.

The son of poor, cotton-picking, sharecropping parents and one of 11 children, Pride was attracted in his youth both by Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts featuring the “King of Country Music” Roy Acuff and honky-tonk artists Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb and by baseball. He received his first guitar at age 14 but initially pursued a career as a pitcher and outfielder in the Negro American League—all the while singing country songs for teammates on bus trips. In 1960 he moved to west-central Montana, where he played minor-league and semiprofessional baseball and performed music in local nightclubs. After a disc jockey in Helena, Montana, introduced Pride to country stars Red Sovine and Red Foley, Pride pursued a publishing and recording contract in Nashville, inspired and encouraged by those two musicians (especially Sovine).

For as long as the genre had existed, there had been some African Americans who performed country songs; harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey, for instance, had been a feature of the Grand Ole Opry as early as the late 1920s and blues-oriented songsters such as Leadbelly and Mississippi John Hurt also sang country or country-flavoured repertoire. When Pride relocated to Nashville in the mid-1960s, however, there had never been an African American singing star in the field, and the music industry was far from certain there could ever be one. Some within the industry resisted the concept. After more than a year of fruitless efforts to establish himself as a country music singer, Pride finally received a recording contract—with RCA Victor—in 1965, with the backing of producer Jack Clement, who had worked with country music legend Johnny Cash and rockabilly musician Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun Records in the 1950s. The label’s commitment quickly panned out: from the release of his first single—“The Snakes Crawl at Night” (1966)—country music audiences were drawn to Pride’s rich baritone voice, the extraordinary clarity and affecting simplicity of his singing, and the traditional content of the songs he recorded.

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Over the next 20 years Pride recorded 50 singles that reached the top 10 on the country music charts. Some indeed rose to number one, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and eventually became acknowledged classics of country music. Among these hits were “All I Have to Offer You (Is Me)” (1969), “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” (1970), “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’ ” (1971), and “Someone Loves You Honey” (1978). Throughout that two-decade stretch of market success, Pride regularly recorded country classics from the post-World War II honky-tonk era, making the senior Hank Williams’s songs “Kaw-Liga,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” and “You Win Again” top hits again, a generation after their original release.

Pride received multiple awards from the Country Music Association, including Entertainer of the Year in 1971 and top male vocalist in both 1971 and 1972. In 1993 he joined the Grand Ole Opry, and his memoirs—Pride: The Charley Pride Story, written with Jim Henderson—were published the following year. Pride was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000, and he remained one of country music’s most successful live attractions—often performing with his son Dion and his younger brother Stephen—into the 21st century. In 2006 he released Pride and Joy: A Gospel Music Collection, and Choices appeared in 2011. In 2017 Pride was honoured with a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement, and that year he also released the album Music in My Heart.

Pride died in 2020 from complications related to COVID-19.