It was just last month that our own Charley Pride — who Preston Hollow and North Dallas residents would sometimes get a glimpse of at Texaco, the Forest/Preston 7-Eleven, the grocery store, or St. Monica’s Church — won an amazing honor: he was awarded the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville.
Amazingly, he was the very first Black artist to receive the honor since it was first created in 2012. He was still touring and performing until very recently.
I drove by his low-slung, Frank Lloyd Wright-style home with the metal roof on Northaven Road countless times, sometimes twice in one day when car-pooling. It has more than 8,500 square feet, eight bedrooms, and I always wondered if he was inside strumming in his studio or teaching music to his beautiful grandchildren.
Pride, who was 86 but didn’t look it, died Saturday, December 12 of complications from COVID-19.
If you don’t know his name, you just don’t know much about music. Even I, who became “woke” to country music about 30 years ago, loved his velvet baritone voice that floated like silk threads, soothed and comforted.
From 1966 until 1987, Pride was one of the biggest stars in country music, scoring 52 Top 10 country hits, including 29 chart-toppers. More than a dozen of his songs crossed over to the pop charts, including “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone.” He was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame, won four Grammys, and sold an estimated 70 million records — more than anyone at RCA not named Elvis.
Baseball Brought Pride to Dallas
Born on March 18, 1934, in Sledge, Mississippi, Pride was a sharecropper’s son who rose to become the first black superstar in country music.
Many fellow country music legends paid tribute to Pride today on Twitter, including Dolly Parton, calling him one of her “dearest and oldest friends.”
Pride moved to Dallas in the 1970s because of geographical convenience. His first dream had been to play baseball in the Negro Leagues. At the age of 16, he showed immense baseball talent. He played organized games in the Iowa State League and then professional games in the Negro American League as a pitcher and outfielder for the Memphis Red Sox. He played with several teams.
But in 1958, he cut a professionally recorded demo at Sun Studios.
Several takes were recorded on a song titled “There’s My Baby (Walkin’)”, a thinly disguised adaption of the 1957 pop hit “The Stroll” by the Diamonds. For better or worse, Charley was still trying to find his voice as a singer and the demo didn’t prove very helpful in furthering his aspirations as a music artist at the time.
After a two-year stint in the Army, Charley moved to Montana in 1960 to play for the Missoula Timberjacks. He ended up working at a smelter operated by the Anaconda Mining Company and playing for its semi-pro baseball team, the East Helena Smelterites. In 1961, tried out for the Los Angeles Angels but headed back to Helena after just two weeks in camp where he worked the night clubs.
Prior to this his music career consisted of singing on bus trips. He had no formal training; he taught himself guitar at 14 years of age, purchasing his first — a Silvertone — from a Sears Roebuck catalog. While maintaining this smelter-day, singing-night schedule, Pride caught the attention of country stars who eventually invited him to Nashville. At that point, the baseball career was in his rear-view mirror. Pride did enjoy practicing/pitching with professional teams, including the Rangers, all through his life and as recently as 10 years ago.
Pride was friends with several U.S. presidents, from Gerald Ford to George H.W. & George W. Bush, to Bill Clinton, at whose inauguration he performed.
The Prides have been Dallas-based for 50 years. Dallas had, he has said, the proximity to travel he needed, especially to Nashville, and it gave his wife and children a good life and great schools. The Prides bought their North Dallas estate a few years after their move here. The home has a tennis court and indoor swimming pool.
Pride is survived by his wife, Ebby Rozene Cohran Pride, three children, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
