Famous country singer Charley Pride, 86, has died today from COVID-19 complications. He was and is an important figure in the genre, for he was the first black superstar of said genre.
Snip from the article:
Charley Frank Pride was born to father Mack Pride and mother Tessie B. Stewart Pride on March 18, 1934 in Sledge, Mississippi. One of 11 children, he worked as a kid picking cotton for his father, a local sharecropper, saving $10 to buy his first guitar, with an assist from his mother, out of a Sears Roebuck catalog.
He learned songs from formative Opry singers, often hearing the Louvin Brothers on the famed WSM broadcast — which, at 50,000 watts, traveled 275 miles southwest to Pride's corner of rural Mississippi — and catching radio star Smilin' Eddie Hill at makeshift concerts in town.
"I lived only 54 miles from Memphis," Pride said. "They'd come down, put a flat bed truck up."
Pride later told Hill: "I wanted to get up there so bad. He said, 'You shoulda said something. We would've probably got ya up there.' That wasn't the thing to do back in those days. Segregation, you know."
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As we know, he became a huge star in the 1960s and thereafter.
What I didn't know about him he was actually a major league baseball player, becoming a pioneer as a black player back in the 1950s. When opportunities dwindled as he got older, he had to change careers. He turned to professional singing.
One of his most popular songs:
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