Charley Pride, a son of sharecroppers who rose to become country music’s first Black superstar on the strength of hits including Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’ and Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone, died on Saturday in hospital care in Dallas. He was 86.

Jeremy Westby, a publicist for Pride, said the cause was complications of Covid-19.

Pride was not the first Black artiste to record country music, but none of his predecessors had anywhere near the degree of success he enjoyed. In 1971, just four years after his first hit records, he won the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award — the genre’s highest honour.

He began his recording career in 1963; two years later, he signed a contract with RCA Records, shuffling between Montana and Nashville before eventually relocating to live full time in the hub of country music.
In 1967, his recording of Just Between You and Me became a Top 10 hit on Billboard’s country music charts. Only then did he quit his smelting job.

Last month in Nashville, Pride received the Country Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented to him by Jimmie Allen, a young Black country star. It was his last public performance.

In the 20 years after his 1967 breakout hit, 51 more of Pride’s records reached the country Top 10 — 29 of them hitting No. 1 — opening doors for other Black country music stars like Darius Rucker, who co-hosted this year’s CMA Awards. “No person of colour had ever done what he has done,” Rucker said in a 2019 PBS documentary about Pride.

Pride himself wrote in his memoir, Pride: The Charley Pride Story (1994), “We’re not colourblind yet, but we’ve advanced a few paces along the path and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.”

Though Pride faced racism in the industry — the singer Loretta Lynn was instructed not to embrace him at an awards show in the 1970s should he win the award she was presenting — many of his white counterparts in country music welcomed him as the star he had become. (He did win the award, and Lynn not only hugged but kissed him.)

When word spread that Pride was Black, many radio stations refused to play his music. But Faron Young, a white country music star, came to Pride’s defence, telling one station manager that “if he takes Charley Pride off, take all my records off”.

New York Times News Service