Black Star of White Soul

"I'm Charley Pride." The name flows out easily in a slow Delta drawl. It is a Good Ole Boy voice with a reedy bayou twang. The sound deceives: the voice may be bone white, but the speaker's skin is as black as the soil of his native Mississippi. "White folks come up and say, 'How come you sound like us and look like them?'" Pride chuckles. "Then I'll meet a black and he says, 'You know, you look like us--but you sound like them!' "

The Marian Anderson of country music, Pride was the first black singer to perform as a headliner at the Grand Ole Opry, in January 1967. His early records were sent to disc jockeys without the customary promotion photographs. Today he is a major celebrity in his home state and the only country musician invited to appear this year in the prestigious arts festival held in Jackson, Miss. A three-time Grammy winner whose 21 albums have earned more than $20 million, he has sold more records for RCA than any singer since Elvis Presley. Charley Pride is the black superstar of white soul.

A tall, powerfully built man of 36, Pride is the son of a sharecropper from Sledge, Miss. Together with ten brothers and sisters, he milked cows before hiking four miles to school. Weekends he chopped cotton for $6 a day. On Saturday nights, pressed up against the battery-operated Philco radio, he would sing along with Opry Stars Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb.

Pride first tried professional baseball unsuccessfully. Veteran Country Entertainer Red Sovine discovered him singing in 1963 in a Montana honkytonk. By day he skimmed slag from 2,400DEG F. pools of lead in the East Helena smelter. It did not require much effort by Sovine to persuade Pride to try his luck in Nashville. Says Pride: "It sure beats picking cotton and working in that smelter."

"Country Charley" Pride is synonymous with light heart songs--Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'--and nostalgic ballads idealizing hard labor--Cotton Fields. He does not write music but uses his smooth, feeling baritone to interpret the mood of the moment.

Pride lives in Dallas with his wife Rozene and their three children. He does not travel by luxury megabus as many other country stars do but leases a Fairchild F-27 jet plane. He owns the 125-acre farm that his family worked during his childhood and grosses more than $2 million each year from recordings and 65 concerts. In addition, Pride is a partner in three music-publishing companies, president of a company that manufactures outdoor grills, and a director of the Guaranty Bank in Dallas, fitting in easily in a society of self-made men who have a healthy respect for money and power.

Yet this year's vacation was a Walter Mitty six-week holiday taking spring training with the Texas Rangers, and Pride confesses that his goal is to own a major-league baseball club before he is 45. "My body's still in shape, and I can still hit the ball," he says rather wistfully. "Can out-hit anything breathing, I tell you."

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