Wading through a never-ending cesspool of tragic events that surrounded country music over the past 12 months, last week I mentally started formulating a year-in-review story.
When the COVID-19 pandemic caused the IHSA and NCAA to cancel high school and college basketball championship tournaments in March, the music world quickly followed. All live performances were immediately halted, from solo gigs at the corner bar to sold-out mega-festivals.
The seriousness of the disease got ugly quickly.
On March 29, Joe Diffie died from COVID complications. He was just 61 and two months earlier had performed at the Marion Cultural & Civic Center. In a chilling flash, âThe Pickup Manâ was gone.
Blue collar workers filled many of the labor-intensive positions at Heartland Pump, a Carterville company that was sold to a global corporation in 2012.
At the end of a grueling shift, back in the day of local ownership, the company parking lot would be full of employees covered in mud from boots to hips, knuckles bloody from hours of banging wrenches into steel pipes. They specialized in placement of enormous industrial equipment that could turn huge bodies of water into tiny mud puddles within a few hours.
Imagine the after-hours group chatter, which probably ranged from disbelief to guarded anticipation, when they heard one of their co-workers was going to provide musical entertainment at the annual Christmas party.
Charley Pride worked a knuckle ball into his arsenal of pitches during the 1956 season with the Memphis Red Sox and the results were so successful he was named to the Negro American League All-Star team.
Then, his baseball dreams were abruptly put on hold for two years as he was drafted into the Army. His military service didnât stop his momentum as he returned to the all-star game in 1958. He eventually earned tryouts with two major league teams before shoulder problems ended his career.
Pride had a solid âPlan Bâ to fall back on. Recording tracks at Sun Records in Memphis in 1958 whet his musical appetite. When his baseball interests led him to Montana in 1960, the team owner paid him $10 per game and an additional $10 to sing at the front gate before the game to draw in customers.