At 85 years old, and with 52 top-10 Billboard country hits, Charley Pride's career has endured for decades.
Of all the gifts Charley Pride has surely been given, maybe the one that has mattered most is his seeming ease.including 29 No. 1's. Not the arm that got him a spot on the Negro American League's Memphis Red Sox as a teenage pitcher, something he'd aimed for from the moment he first heard about Jackie Robinson and realized that baseball could be his way out of the Sledge, Mississippi, cotton fields.
"My plan this year is to go out to California…and do it myself," Pride says."I'm going to find the producers and directors and all out there, best I can, and go try to look 'em in the eye." Then he told a story that epitomizes who he is and why, perhaps, he has endured. People have asked Pride his whole career what it's like to be black in country music; how he managed not just to stick around but to succeed spectacularly; why he thought this art form that was by the time of his adolescence so dominated, commercially, by white performers could be for him in the first place—but somehow the question never really takes.
He was in a huge package show in Detroit, performing alongside the likes of Merle Haggard, Red Foley, and Buck Owens. He'd driven from Montana, where until recently he'd worked as a smelter for the Anaconda Mining Company and played for the semi-pro baseball team, the East Helena Smelterites.
That's the kind of effort it takes to make things feel effortless. In the myth-making that happens over a career more than half a century long, maybe it's inevitable that some of the crucial yet complicated storylines fade while others—arguably, the most facile—are slowly etched in stone. We're so conditioned these days to think in terms of identities, little bits of data that seem to dictate everything from who'll follow us on Instagram to what we think we're capable of. Which makes chatting for hours with someone who just relentlessly resists that as strange as feeling like a resonant, remembered voice on the phone in Dallas has somehow summoned New York City's first storm of the fall.
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