Artist: Charley Pride
LP: Christmas In My Home Town
Song: "Christmas In My Home Town"
[ listen ]
Song: "Santa and the Kids"
[ listen ]
Song: "O Holy Night"
[ listen ]
Country music legend Charley Pride died earlier this week from illness related to COVID-19. Reading about his career on Wikipedia just now, I learned a number of things (the number 4) about Charley that I hadn't known before:
1.) Before his music career took off, Charley Pride played professional baseball! He pitched for teams in places like Memphis, Tennessee; Boise, Idaho; Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; Louisville, Kentucky; Missoula, Montana. When Charley was let go from the team in Missoula...
2.) Charlie Pride and his family lived in Helena, Montana for a number of years (the number 9), from 1960 to 1969, where Charlie did hard labor in a smelter during the day, while pursuing his dreams of a career in the arts at night (sound familiar?).
3.) Though I knew Charley Pride was black, of course, I'd never before considered what it must have been like for him to have to face a crowd of (it's safe to assume) mostly all-white country music fans who may not have been aware of this fact in the early days of Pride's success in the mid-to-late 1960s. According to Wikipedia: In the late summer of 1966, on the strength of his early releases, [Charley] was booked for his first large show, in Detroit's Olympia Stadium.
Since no biographical information had been included with those singles,
few of the 10,000 country fans who came to the show knew Pride was
black, and discovered the fact only when he walked onto the stage, at
which point the applause trickled off to silence. "I knew I'd have to
get it over with sooner or later," Pride later remembered. "I told the
audience: 'Friends, I realize it's a little unique, me coming out here —
with a permanent suntan — to sing country and western to you. But
that's the way it is.'"
4.) Charley had 30 hits that reached the top of the country music charts in the USA, and one of them, "Kiss An Angel Good Mornin'," was also a top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts, reaching #21 in early 1972.
Charlie Pride's one and only Christmas album was released in 1970, and I found this pristine copy earlier today at Golden Oldies Records in Wallingford. The New York Times obituary for Charlie Pride can be found here.
[ March 18, 1934 — December 12, 2020 ]
We will miss you, Charley.
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