A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.
A fan will grab you and hug you and will not let go. When that happens, you wish it could be that way all over the world.
A lot of celebrities relish politics and are eager to lend their names to candidates and causes. I never wanted to be a spokesman for anybody.
A woman went so far as to hire private detectives to contact me to help bring her out of what she called a hypnotic trance.
After 14 months of military service, I had a wife, a child, half an apartment, no car, and no job.
Any entertainer who tells you that the adoration of fans is not a heady experience probably never had the experience.
As far back as I can remember, the radio held a special fascination for me.
Baseball got into my blood early and I worked harder at it than anything.
Being rejected by the Angels affected me more than I wanted to admit.
Besides good schools, a good airport, and the Cowboys, Dallas had golf courses, and golf was fast becoming an obsession with me.
Burning bridges was not something I was ever inclined to do.
Chet Atkins... is probably the best guitar player who ever lived.
Early in my career I began receiving letters from a woman in the Midwest who claimed to be my mother.
Even now, when I'm asked how I'm doing, I like to reply, 'Pretty good. I've got all my fingers and both eyes.
Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.
Fans will praise you, scold you, and offer helpful advice. Fans will also defend you.
Flying was as necessary to my business as fiddles and footlights.
For most entertainers, there is a single experience, one defining moment, when confidence replaces the self-doubt that most of us wrestle with.
Getting acquainted with Nashville was largely a matter of satisfying the curiosity of other performers.
How can you not perform, how can you not go on stage and feel that rush and look at those faces and feel the auras?
How often does a guy who lives and breathes baseball meet a woman who loves the game and understands it as well as he?
I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.
I began playing Branson during the 1992 season and was a little amazed. There were about 30 celebrity theatres there and more are being added all the time.
I believe it is possible to tell what sign some people were born under by watching their eyes, watching how they walk, how they talk.
I could feel the stares and hear the noise level shift when I walked across the room, set up my equipment, and began tuning the guitar.
I couldn't remain a faceless voice forever. Most of Nashville realized I was black and word was getting out to the rest of the country as well.
I didn't talk the basic Southern black dialect.
I don't care what the religion is called; as far as I'm concerned, one God, the God I adhere to, is in charge of all of them.
I dropped out of school at 15 and went to live with my uncle.
I finally came to terms with manic depression and lithium. I've taken lithium regularly for the past few years and have had no further bouts with manic depression.
I finally realized I couldn't depend on people who just wanted a bigger piece of the nightly pie and I was fed up with their threats to walk out.
I grew up in a farm in the South, not a dude ranch in the West, and I would have felt out of place in Western duds.
I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.
I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well.
I loved Mississippi and do to this day. The rainbows that stretch from horizon to horizon after a summer rain are the most spectacular I have ever seen.
I might have become a minor celebrity but royalty checks were a long way off.
I realize I was more of a curiosity to the older Nashville artists than the new ones.
I think there's enough room in country music for everybody.
I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.
I was sometimes jeered by black soldiers who wanted me to sing something besides country music.
I'd like to second George Jones's message to the moguls: Don't count us out. We ain't dead yet.
I'm not James Brown. I'm not Sam Cooke. I'm Charley Pride. I'm just me and that's what you got.
I've seen people who have been coming to my shows for 25 years.
I've tried to help a lot of young artists get started.
If Detroit was a watershed concert for me, traveling with Willie Nelson through Texas and Louisiana was a milestone of a different sort.
In 20 years I had sold more records for RCA than any artist except Elvis Presley.
In those early days I sang Hank's songs so often that a rumor began circulating that I was his illegitimate son.
It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.
It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.
It was not unusual for a newcomer to open a show, but I was not the standard neophyte.
It was unlikely that anyone had ever heard a black person sing country music.
Johnny Duncan was one of the first opening acts I hired for my show, and he is the one who initiated me into astrology. I got hooked. It made a lot of sense to me.
Mother was a talkative person, and I was a lot like her.
My bride-to-be was the first one who troubled me in ways I didn't understand. I wanted to be with her but was frightened of my feelings for her.
My brothers and sisters all sang, too, and they all have good voices.
No one church has all the answers or the perfect map to the Promised Land, and I prefer to work out my own faith and my own convictions in the seclusion of my own mind.
No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another-I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.
Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting.
People pay attention to lyrics, and the race matter was delicate.
Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing.
Redd Foxx was the same gruff old codger you saw on television.
Singing as a full-time job was not something I had given a lot of thought to and I had no clear notion of the money to be made in it.
So my first song was a cheatin' song instead of a love song, but I have no complaints.
The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.
The time I spent thinking about how I was better than somebody else or worrying about somebody else's attitude was time I could put to better use.
There are worse things than being thought a Republican.
There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.
There was no physical segregation in Helena, but the mental partitions were unavoidable.
There were no guarantees that country music, whose roots were in the South, were ready for Charley Pride.
There were very few black people in Montana but we never felt out of place.
Too many religious organizations are in the business of enforcing beliefs.
Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did.
What qualifies me to tell people how to act or what to think? I'm Charley Pride, country singer. Period.
What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.
When I came up, there was room for the new and the old. For every new artist, an old one didn't have to be pushed out.
He is a country western singer.
Made his first national appearance on TV in the premiere episode of "Hee Haw" (1969) June 15, 1969.
Became a member of the Grand Ole Opry on May 1, 1993.
Admitted to the Country Music Hall of Fame in the year 2000.
Played baseball in the Negro American League.
Charley and Rozene have raised two sons, Kraig and Dion, as well as a daughter, Angela. They also have two grandsons, Carlton and Malachi.
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