Charley Pride, who sold millions of records and was the first Black performer to become a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, among many other honors, has died at age 86. An announcement posted on the singer’s website said Pride passed away in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday from complications due to COVID-19.
A sharecropper’s son from Mississippi, Pride became one of the first Black men to become a significant star in a style where most of the biggest hitmakers are white. Rising to prominence within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, Pride recorded dozens of songs that topped the country music charts, including “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone.”
Pleasure had no less than 30 no. 1 hit on the country music charts and won nearly every major award accessible to a rustic musician. In all, Pleasure received three Grammys, together with “Finest Male Nation Vocal Performance” in 1972 in addition to a number of awards from the Nation Music Affiliation, who named him their Entertainer of the Year in 1971. His last efficiency was on November 11 at the CMA Awards, the place he carried out “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” with Jimmie Allen.
Alongside his aggressive accolades, Pleasure gained practically every different honor awarded to somebody of his stature within the style, together with inductions into the Nation Music Corridor of Fame, in 2000, and the Grand Ole Opry — the mecca of nation music the place Pleasure first carried out in 1967 — in 1993.
