Investor's Business Daily, September 24th, 2007
Like many youngsters, Charley Pride dreamed of becoming a pro athlete -- a baseball player.
Although he did well in semipro ball, the majors didn't exactly write him into the starting lineup.
So he put down his mitt, picked up a guitar and worked on Plan B -- becoming the first African-American superstar in country music.
Pride's rise to the top of the music charts was a long, hard journey. He started with nothing, overcame racial barriers and proved that good music was good music, regardless of the color of the singer's skin.
Over his 40-plus-year career, he has sold more than 70 million albums, 31 of which are gold, three platinum and one quadruple-platinum.
His voice is "rich and warm," Tom Erlewine, senior editor at All Music Guide, told IBD. "He has some characteristics of a crooner that really brings you into a song."
From fun, high-tempo tunes to heartfelt ballads, Pride does it with style. Just don't expect him to wear a cowboy hat or a rhinestone-studded jacket. He usually belts out tunes in a sweater or sport coat.
Charley Frank Pride was born in 1938 in Sledge, Miss., to a poor sharecropper family. He was the fourth of 11 children.
Charley isn't exactly his first name. His father, Mack Pride, named him Charl Frank Pride, but a typo on his birth certificate gave him two extra letters, which stuck.
Charley Pride's love of country music spawned at an early age. Each week, Mack Pride tuned the family's Philco radio to Nashville's WSM for "The Grand Ole Opry," the longest-running radio program in the nation as well as a club for country's top performers. A star-struck Charley would sing along with legendary country acts such as Hank Williams, Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubbs.
At 14, after saving up for nearly a year, Pride bought his first guitar -- a Silvertone from the Sears Roebuck catalog. He didn't take lessons but taught himself by sitting next to the radio, waiting for a combination of tones and tuning his guitar to it.
Pride knew he wanted more than what the Mississippi Delta had to offer. In his 1994 autobiography, "Pride: The Charley Pride Story," he wrote, "I always had the feeling that there was something else I was supposed to do, something besides following in my father's footsteps and being another sharecropper working another man's land."
At age 16, he left home to play baseball. He hooked up with a team in Des Moines, Iowa, but conditions were sorry. The team received no salary, only a percentage of the gate. Often games were rained out, so players never got a dime. At times, Pride got so hungry that he ate weeds.
He bounced around between teams before finding a steady paycheck as a pitcher and outfielder for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League.
Now he wanted to play in the major leagues. So he sent newspaper clippings of himself to the Chicago Cubs, hoping for a tryout. They turned him down.
In 1956, his baseball career went to the bench. The Army drafted him, and he served two years.
Upon discharge, Pride settled in Montana, where he got a job at a smelting plant and played ball on the side.
Pride kept making his pitch to the big leagues. The expansion Los Angeles Angels gave him a tryout in 1961, but they told him he didn't have the right stuff.
Three years later he tried to make it with the New York Mets. Pride was in his mid-20s, so he figured this was his last shot. The Mets quickly sent him packing.
Pride kept going -- all the way to Nashville, Tenn. He wanted to win in another field -- music -- but he labored. Record labels loved his singing, but upon learning he was black, they wouldn't gamble on him.
Pride didn't give up. He displayed his talent to Chet Atkins, the singer turned record executive, and the relationship clicked. Atkins made sure to sign Pride to the biggest record company at that time, RCA.
RCA kept Pride's race low-key. The firm sent out press releases without his picture on them. RCA wasn't about to advertise his skin color until radio stations and fans accepted his music. Pride's reaction was pragmatic. He told Jet magazine, "I didn't go into country music to break down barriers."
He wanted to be judged by his music, not his pigmentation.
In his book, Pride recalled how he eased audiences' initial shock of seeing a black country singer by making light of his "permanent tan."
In November 1966, RCA released his first album, "Country Charley Pride." He elected to be selective about the songs he recorded or performed, as a black man singing about a white girlfriend could have spelled trouble. His first single off the album, "Snakes Crawl at Night," about a man shooting his cheating wife, was race-neutral.
His third cut off his debut album, "Just Between You and Me," climbed into the Billboard country music top 10, won him national recognition and received a Grammy nomination.
In 1969, he scored his first Billboard country No. 1 hit with "All I Have to Offer You Is Me."
Over a two-year span, he was king of the country charts six more times.
Pride is best known for his upbeat "Kiss an Angel Good Morning," which in 1971 topped the country charts and made headway in the pop arena.
"It's the song that lifted him to a new level," Jimmy Kay, host of "Sunday Night Classics" on Go Country, an FM station in Los Angeles, told IBD. "It's one of my most requested songs."
On the RCA Records label, Pride's music outsold every other artist except Elvis Presley.
In 1993, Pride became a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Seven years later he was inducted into Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame.
Pride also found success beyond music -- with his ownership of a bank, real estate and radio stations.
Today Pride, 69, runs publishing and production firms and the Charley Pride Theater in Branson, Mo.
He even purchased that farm where he grew up.
Still, it's Pride's voice that has kept his star burning for four decades.
"He's just a really great country singer," said All Music Guide's Erlewine. "His music stands apart from any sociological things, and that's the greatest testament to his talent."
