Hall-of-famer

The Charley Pride legacy

by Grant Alden

The same racial politics that make Charley Pride a unique figure in country music have made it difficult to place his music in its proper context. But some clues are offered by two recent releases, the 16-track compilation RCA Country Legends (Buddha) and his new A Tribute to Jim Reeves (Music City). Pride grew up wanting to be a professional baseball player, not a country-music singer. And so this spring he came to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and not Cooperstown, having succeeded at his second choice only after the expansion New York Mets refused to give him a tryout -- or so the legend goes.

Pride was indeed a major-league success in country music: the liner notes to A Tribute to Jim Reeves repeat the longstanding boast that, with 70 million sold, he's is RCA's second most successful artist, after Elvis. Pride and Presley do make an interesting pair. In Elvis RCA had an artist who answered Sam Phillips's oft-cited search for "a white man who had the Negro sound, and the Negro feel." Charley, meanwhile, wanted to sound like Jim Reeves, who died in a 1964 plane crash. Pride was the flip side of the Elvis coin -- the first black country-music superstar.

But his proved to be a singular success. Unlike Jackie Robinson, he opened no doors for fellow African-Americans. Perhaps he would have made a bigger impact if he'd left a more distinctive imprint on the music. That's a cheap shot, perhaps, but even in his best material, Pride seems an almost colorless vocalist, a crooner in the style of Eddy Arnold or Gene Autry (or Elvis's model, Dean Martin).

His contemporary Charlie Rich could be forgiven the pop schlock of "Behind Closed Doors" because even a cursory tour through Rich's varied catalogue reveals far more compelling material. Pride's signature hit and major crossover pop breakthrough, "Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'," offers a much more accurate barometer of his strengths and weaknesses. Good schlock is good schlock. And there are plenty of reasons why country's only black star would choose to seem as bland as possible. But it makes for a puzzling legacy.

The RCA Country Legends collection, which features the hits leavened by his first single, "Snakes Crawl at Night," is a fair summary of a commercial country singer's career (ending with the last of his 29 country #1's, his 1981 cover of the 1963 David Houston hit "Mountain of Love"). But it stops short of making a convincing argument for Pride's greatness. If anything, it suggests that this could have been a more interesting career. "Snakes Crawl at Night," which flopped, is the grim, luckless kind of song a young Johnny Paycheck loved to cut. But Pride lost that impulse soon enough: his almost courtly live show, as captured on the 1968 album In Person (reissued in 1998 by Koch), suggests that he much preferred the sophistication of a sober rat-packer. In country music, that meant Gentleman Jim Reeves.

Why, then, sing "Mississippi Cotton-Pickin' Delta Town" and so many similarly themed pieces? Pride clearly sought to bring upper-middle-class elegance to the working-class songs that remained at the center of country music in the 1960s. Compare, for example, his take on the Harlan Howard classic "Busted" with the Johnny Cash version. Or "Honky Tonk Blues" to the Hank Williams original. The contrasts suggest how little emotion Pride invested in his material. He's much better when removed from that social milieu, as on "Wonder Could I Live There Anymore."

And he is utterly at home throughout the Jim Reeves tribute. He's 63 now, and his vocals have acquired a deeper, richer timbre. The album re-creates the signature flourishes of late-1960s Nashville: tinkling piano, swelling strings, carefully restrained back-up vocals. Although the songs range from Reeves's early honky-tonk ("He'll Have To Go") to mid-'60s easy-listening torch songs ("Welcome to My World"), Pride reveals not the slightest impulse to make them swing. No, Country Charley Pride flattens even Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls" into Middle American, the same way sports announcers flatten ethnic names. And that's probably why he's in the Hall of Fame.