'And I hit it.' Leaving a legacy in country musicīy 1967, Pride sang his way into the top 10 of the country charts with 'Just Between You and Me.' And he didn't stop there.įrom the downhome honesty on 'All I Have to Offer You (Is Me)' to wanderlust heartbreak on 'Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone,' Pride's charming baritone propelled him to the top of country charts throughout the 1970s and '80s. 'Here's what Jack and I came up,' Pride said, ''Ladies and gentlemen I realize it's a little unique with me comin' out on stage wearin' this permanent tan. I got three singles - I only have ten minutes - I get through with those I'll maybe do a Hank Williams song, but I ain't got time to talk about pigmentation.'' This night, he'd be walking out to thousands. He'd been walking out to a few hundred deflated balloons each night. That's what my plan was.'ĭuring a 1966 show at Olympia Stadium in Detroit, Pride faced the biggest gig of his career to that point. 'By the time I was 35 or 36, then I was gonna go sing. 'I was gonna go to the major leagues and break all the records there and set new ones,' Pride said, adding a laugh. He earned a stop in 1956 on the Negro American League all-star team, only to be drafted later that year into U.S. He bounced between Negro leagues and major league farm systems, pitching for teams in Wisconsin, Kentucky, Alabama, Idaho, Texas and, perhaps most notably, the Memphis Red Sox. In the 1950s, not a decade after Jackie Robinson smashed segregation barriers for Black athletes in the major leagues, Pride pursued his own major league career. His first big hit came on the baseball diamond.

Segregation, you know.' From baseball fields to a record dealīut music only played a B-side in Pride's burgeoning passions. We would've probably got ya up there.' That wasn't the thing to do back in those days. Pride later told Hill: 'I wanted to get up there so bad. 'They'd come down, put a flat bed truck up.' 'I lived only 54 miles from Memphis,' Pride said.

He learned songs from formative Opry singers, often hearing the Louvin Brothers on the famed WSM broadcast - which, at 50,000 watts, traveled 275 miles southwest to Pride's corner of rural Mississippi - and catching radio star Smilin' Eddie Hill at makeshift concerts in town. Pride saved $10 to buy his first guitar, with an assist from his mother, out of a Sears Roebuck catalog. One of 11 children, he worked as a kid picking cotton for his father, a local sharecropper who often gathered his family around an old Philco radio to play Grand Ole Opry broadcasts. Stewart Pride on March 18, 1934, in Sledge, Mississippi. Charley Frank Pride was born to father Mack Pride and mother Tessie B.

Black legend singers