Charley Pride’s music taught listeners that country music was black music, too
The mythology of cowboy culture is aggressively white, but there was always a black West.
There’s a story told about the performer Charley Pride that goes something like this. Pride takes to the stage to thunderous applause. Then he walks into the spotlight and the venue falls silent. The audience has realized that Pride, a smooth-voiced mainstay of country music, is black. But Pride starts to perform anyway, and soon the crowd is dazzled.
It’s a nice idea: when an extraordinary musician performs, prejudices fade away and race no longer matters. And it can certainly seem like race didn’t matter for Pride. He has sold 70 million records during his career, has legions of fans, and last year received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys. Dig a bit deeper, however, and it’s clear that Pride’s life reveals a more complicated tale about the relationship of country music to race in America.
Part of the complication comes from the myth that country music is a white genre, because the West was white. The popular mythology of cowboy culture may have been aggressively white, but there was always a black West. Black cowboys were a fixture of the American West as early as the beginning of the 19th century. Following the Civil War, former slaves found freedom on the open range, becoming horsebreakers, rodeo performers, and even ranch foremen. Historians now estimate that as many as one in four cowboys was black. Country music grew out of both white and black folk traditions and came to be thought of as “white,” but there were always black folk performers, too, even if many of their contributions have been lost to history.
Born in 1938, into a sharecropper family with 11 children, Pride grew up in Sledge, Mississippi. His first love was baseball, if only for the promise it offered of a life beyond the cotton fields. “I remember when Jackie Robinson first went to the major leagues that I was picking cotton beside my dad and I said, you know, here’s my way out of this cotton field,” Pride told NPR in 2017. “So my dream was to go to the major leagues and break all the records.” After an illustrious baseball career, he figured he’d turn to singing, “by the time I was 35 or 36.”
Instead, Pride pursued the two paths simultaneously, pitching for the Memphis Red Sox and other Negro American League baseball teams. (He and another player were at one point traded to the Birmingham Black Barons in exchange for a team bus.) After an injury, he ended his major league aspirations, Pride played for the East Helena Smelterites, a company team in Montana.
Pride would sing before the Smelterites games, and, once people heard his voice, opportunities opened up. He joined a local band, the Night Hawks, and was encouraged by Red Sovine, a country singer known for truck-driving songs, to make a career in the genre. He eventually recorded his first solo singles under the direction of Chet Atkins at RCA, and soon made the charts. According to most accounts, Pride’s manager wanted to maximize opportunities for the rising star and was careful not to let many promoters know that Pride was black. Pride himself has challenged this, suggesting that most promoters didn’t care and that his music always spoke for itself. Whatever the truth, in 1967, at the age of 28, Pride became the first black singer to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, a legendary venue that’s often referred to as country music’s most famous stage. It was just the beginning of a hit-making career that is still going strong.
Country fans love Pride for his music, of course, but his celebrity has never been free of racist stereotypes. Throughout his career, Pride has navigated this in myriad ways. Early on, he worked jokes about his “permanent tan” into his stage patter. Later, his recordings made the occasional winking reference to race, like the 1968 album Songs of Pride … Charley, That Is.
As Charles L. Hughes points out in Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, “For those who carried the torch for early-1960s integrationism, Pride personified the racial progress of country music and the country it came from.” Yet for those who supported the more radical platform of the Black Panthers, Pride was “a questionable figure who abandoned the culture of his people in order to perform music by and for whites.” hite country fans, for their part, were likely similarly divided — some showed their solidarity with the civil rights movement through their support of Pride, while others viewed the singer’s presence in the scene as an encroachment.
In 1971, Pride’s superstardom was enshrined when the Country Music Association voted him its Entertainer of the Year and the Male Vocalist of the Year. A December 1970 piece in the Washington Post identified Pride as the unlikely “Black Singer of White ‘Soul.’” The article outlined the “paradox of Charley Pride,” which was that wherever he went, even racist white audiences embraced him. “North and South, in the blue-collar country bars, in the urban ethnic neighborhoods — in George Wallace, white backlash country — Charley Pride is №1,” the piece read. “He even sounds like a redneck.”
Pride has since won numerous other awards, including three Grammys before last year’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In interviews about that honor, Pride expressed pleasure that, although race never disappears from the conversation, it is no longer the first thing on reporters’ minds. Early in his career, he told CNBC, “Reporters would say, ‘Now, Charley, how does it feel to be the Jackie Robinson of country music?’ or ‘How does it feel to be the first colored country singer?’” The question struck him as off-key, as that wasn’t how he thought about himself. As a reply, he used to say, “‘Well, I’m Charley Pride, the staunch American.’”
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