Country Music Star Charley Pride Still Shining Bright

Of all the gifts Charley Pride has surely been given, maybe the one that has mattered most is his seeming ease.

Not his legendary voice, though it's earned him 52 top-10 Billboard country hits, including 29 No. 1's. Not the arm that got him a spot on the Negro American League's Memphis Red Sox as a teenage pitcher, something he'd aimed for from the moment he first heard about Jackie Robinson and realized that baseball could be his way out of the Sledge, Mississippi, cotton fields. Not even his father, a sharecropper who never failed to tune the family's Philco radio to the Grand Ole Opry so young Charley was surrounded by the traditional sound of country.

You just get the sense, listening to Pride talk in that smiling baritone of his, that there isn't a thing in the world he'd let faze him. I reached that epiphany in the midst of a long chat with Pride on a recent autumn afternoon. It'd started off strange: Just as Pride picked up the phone, with a "hello" so unmistakably him it seemed for a second like a recording, a howling wind gave way to a torrential downpour outside my Brooklyn window.

But the drama felt appropriate because Pride has loomed so large in my family history—I have vivid childhood memories