Charley Pride, who has died of complications from Covid-19 aged 86, was a hugely successful American country music star who made history when in 1969 he topped the US country charts, the first black performer to achieve that feat since Louis Jordan 25 years earlier.
The song was All I Have to Offer You (Is Me), and with its lush background vocals and slick production the song epitomised the Nashville sound pioneered by Chet Atkins, the great guitarist and RCA executive who produced it with Cowboy Jack Clement.
Pride hit his artistic purple patch in the late 1960s and early 1970s with ballads of broken hearts, including Just Between You and Me and Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger, as well as more uptempo hits with countrypolitan appeal, among them Kiss an Angel Good Mornin and the paean to hitchhiking Is Anybody Going to San Antone?.
Dennis Quaid is Working on a Movie About Charley Pride s Life
Hollywood superstar, recording artist and recent
The Charley Pride Story. I tried to do a movie on
Charley Pride years ago, and it just didn t go anywhere at the time, Quaid told Wide Open Country in a recent
Jack Clement, who was a great mentor to Charley. So I got ahold of Charley and asked if I could just come and meet him in Dallas. I went and had Mexican lunch with he and his wife Rozene. This was before the pandemic. We got it up and running again.
Black America lost two of its iconic figures this month.
Both born in 1934, Rafer Lewis Johnson died of a stroke on December 2 in Los Angeles and Charley Frank Pride was a COVID-19 victim who succumbed on December 12 in Dallas, Texas.
Both men were athletes, Johnson an Olympic decathlete, and Pride was once a pitcher in the Negro Leagues.
Born in Texas, Johnson moved with his family to the San Joaquin Valley town of Kingsburg and became a high school sports phenomenon while picking cotton with his father and siblings.
Johnson was a silver medalist in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, and a gold medalist in Rome in 1960, the same year Wilma Rudolph, Muhammed Ali, and Oscar Roberson competed.
Eagle Country 99.3 By Travis Thayer
Charley Pride. Shutterstock photo.
Country Music Hall of Famer Charley Pride has died.
Pride passed away Saturday at the age of 86. The cause of death was complications from COVID-19.
The Mississippi-native became country music s first Black superstar in the 1960 s and went on to have a Hall of Fame career. He had 52 top-10 hits, 30 of which went to number one. Some of his most well-known songs include All I Have to Offer You (Is Me) , (I m So) Afraid of Losing You Again , I Can t Believe That You ve Stopped Loving Me , I d Rather Love You , Is Anybody Goin To San Antone , Wonder Could I Live There Anymore , I m Just Me , and Kiss an Angel Good Mornin .
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Baseball’s loss was the music world’s gain when Charley Pride failed to make it from Negro League Baseball to Major League Baseball and took up music instead. On Saturday the world suffered the loss of the first Black superstar of country music when Pride died at 86.
Sadly, Pride became one of nearly 300,000 Americans killed by COVID-19, as the raging pandemic continues to take a tragic toll in the U.S. and around the world.
Born in 1934 into a sharecropper family of 11 children in the delta town of Sledge, Miss., Charley Frank Pride played baseball in the early 1950s for the Memphis Red Sox and the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro American League until being drafted into the Army in 1956. He was unsuccessful in his attempt to join Major League Baseball after his military service.