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The first time most country radio programmers heard Charley Pride, they didn’t know he was Black. RCA Victor released his debut single in 1966 without a photo. The voice did the arguing. That voice — warm, full, perfectly country — brought Pride to Dallas. He would live there for more than fifty years.
Pride grew up in Sledge, Mississippi, the fourth of eleven children in a sharecropping family. He picked cotton as a boy and pitched in the Negro American League before music took over. But once he found country, he never looked back. So he moved to Dallas, signed with RCA, and started making records. They sounded like nothing about them should work. Yet everything about them did.
A Dallas Man
In Dallas, Pride built something beyond music. He ran a music publishing company and invested in real estate. He also became a minority owner of the Texas Rangers. At the time, he was one of the few Black part-owners in Major League Baseball. His Dallas neighbors accepted him long before the industry caught up.
The numbers tell part of the story. He charted 52 singles and landed 29 number-one hits. He also won three Grammy Awards and earned a spot in the Country Music Hall of Fame. But Pride’s neighbors understood something Nashville took longer to grasp. He wasn’t breaking barriers because he was trying to. He was breaking them because he was simply that good. He died in Dallas on December 12, 2020, at 86. But North Texas was home. And for Charley Pride, home meant everything.
