American Masters Charley Pride: I’m Just Me, tells the story of a poor country boy from Mississippi who had “baseball in his soul” and loved singing country music.
“I found out I could sing,” he says in the documentary. “I thought everybody could sing.”
Pride was a pitcher for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League, and he followed a baseball career as far as he could.
But then he became one of the most popular and successful country music recording artists of all time.
In the 1950s, Pride was the lone Black artist accepted by country audiences after decades of whitewashing in the genre. And in 1971, he won the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award.
Pride, who’d lived in Preston Hollow since the ’70s, died in 2020 at age 86.
March 25 marks the 50th anniversary of Pride’s best-selling album, The Best of Charley Pride, Vol. II, which spent 16 weeks at No. 1 after its release.
