BY 
While Charley Pride’s career path was paved by artists like Opry pioneer DeFord Bailey, the Grammy-winner’s success put him on par with his white peers, including Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell and Merle Haggard, in a way that had never been afforded to Black artists before.
Charley Pride wasn’t country music’s first Black artist, but he reached heights that had not been available to early Black singers and musicians in the genre. And he did it by winning over millions of country music fans.
While Pride’s career path was paved by artists like Opry pioneer DeFord Bailey, the Grammy-winner’s success put him on par with his white peers, including Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell and Merle Haggard, in a way that had never been afforded to Black artists before.
Pride, whose hits include “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone,” died Saturday in Dallas of complications from COVID-19, according to his publicist. He was 86.
The pride of Sledge, Mississippi, was the son of a sharecropper who initially turned to sports as a way to a better life.
He was a pitcher and outfielder in the Negro American League with the Memphis Red Sox and in the Pioneer League in Montana.
After playing minor league baseball, he ended up in Helena, Montana, where he worked in a zinc smelting plant by day and played country music in nightclubs at night.
Baseball was Pride’s first success, but it was the Grand Ole Opry that his father insisted everyone listen to on their home radio that would prove to be his lasting legacy.
“Everything we listened to was what he had tuned it to, so I got to listening to Grand Ole Opry and all when I was small and I got hooked on it and it just went from there,” Pride told The Associated Press at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in 2017. “I had no idea that I was preparing myself for this, but I’m glad, especially since I didn’t make it in baseball.”
After a tryout with the New York Mets, Pride visited Nashville and broke into country music when Chet Atkins, head of RCA Records, heard two of his demo tapes and signed him.
His first few singles were sent to radio stations without a publicity photo. After his race became known, a few country radio stations refused to play his music, and some promoters were hesitant to book him.
Until the early 1990s, when Cleve Francis came along, Pride was the only Black country singer signed to a major label. During his career, other Black country artists such as Linda Martell, O.B. McClinton and Stoney Edwards were also charting country songs, as well as Ray Charles and the Pointer Sisters. In 1993, he joined the Grand Ole Opry cast in Nashville.
“They used to ask me how it feels to be the ‘first colored country singer,‘ ” he told The Dallas Morning News in 1992. “Then it was ‘first Negro country singer;’ then ‘first Black country singer.’ Now I’m the `first African-American country singer.′ That’s about the only thing that’s changed. This country is so race-conscious, so ate-up with colors and pigments. I call it ‘skin hangups’ — it’s a disease.”
Still, he remains the only Black country artist to achieve many of those heights, a sign that country music still has a long way to go to breaking down the racial walls, even decades later.
Throughout his career, he sang positive songs instead of sad ones often associated with country music.
