(written by Ben Peters)
Charley Pride (#1 country, #21 pop, 1971)
When RCA premiered its newest country music artist in late 1965, the company decided to promote him in a very low-key manner. While the company gave a detailed description of the man’s love of baseball and his ability to sing a country song, the label didn’t describe his physical appearance at all and did not issue any photos with the introductory bio sent out to radio stations and concert promoters.
It is thus ironic that Charley Pride’s first hit was entitled “Just Between You And Me,” because that is just how RCA treated the matter of the singer’s race. The label didn’t mind telling folks that their new singer was “tall, dark and handsome,” they just didn’t go into any details about how dark.
In all other ways other than race, Charley Pride seemed to be the ideal candidate for a career in country music. Born dirt poor in backwoods Mississippi, Pride had grown up loving country music. He listened to the Grand Ole Opry each week and was especially drawn to Hank Williams. Charley also liked listening to the Louisiana Hayride out of Shreveport. In spite of warnings from family and friends that singing hillbilly music wouldn’t get him anywhere, the boy continued to learn the songs of the white rural South. Charley even bought a guitar when he was a teenager and began to play his favorite country numbers, trying to imitate the artists as best he could. Most of his peers thought he was crazy and many told him so. But no matter. Except for baseball, country music was the love of the young man’s life.
Besides Hank Williams, Pride’s other hero was Jackie Robinson. When Robinson broke baseball’s color line, it gave 20-year-old Charley a new dream. No longer would he have to limit his baseball ambitions to just the Negro leagues. Now he could set his sights on becoming a star in the major leagues. With a new passion, he set out on his chosen path.
Working his way through the Negro leagues for several years, Pride finally landed with a mixed-race minor league organization in 1960. With his guitar in tow, he headed for the Helena, Montana farm club. Singing to entertain his teammates and the local baseball fans in the area landed Charley a part-time job in a night club. Soon he was playing before packed houses. Yet, even though a career in music seemed more promising than baseball, Pride didn’t give up on the game until 1964. He knew it was time to quit when the New York Mets didn’t feel he was good enough for their sorry team. Charley hung up his spikes. But he was concerned. Without baseball, what would he do?
By chance, country star Red Sovine came through the area, saw Pride’s performance at the night club and encouraged him to pursue music as a profession. Sovine even brought Charley to Nashville and introduced him around town. Impressed with his talent, Webb Pierce recorded him on a demo. One label liked Pride’s sound, but wanted him to dress funny and call himself George Washington The Third! Well, Charley refused to dishonor or cheapen himself or his race. If that was what it took to break into country music, then he would gladly go back to Mississippi and work in the cotton fields.
RCA’s A&R director Chet Atkins somehow got hold of Pride’s demo tape that Webb Pierce had made and played it for the company’s executives. They loved Charley’s sound. While they all agreed that the label should sign this fine singer to a recording contract, Chet then informed them that Charley was black. For a few moments there was silence. Then one man spoke up and said, “He’s great and I think we should take a chance.” The others quickly agreed.
RCA signed Charley and then the promotions department had to figure out just how to market him. As their early press releases proved, the label was going to be very cautious. They realized that they were handling dynamite. When Pride had idolized Jackie Robinson and what he had done for baseball, Charley had no idea that later he would be called upon to break a color barrier that seemed even more imposing. In the midst of marches and sit-in protests as well as the integration of schools, stores and restaurants, Pride barged into the fray as the first black country music singer. It wasn’t easy. With some members of Congress even predicting race wars throughout the nation, it was understandable why RCA didn’t want to share what made their new star so uniquely different than any other country act. It’s a wonder that Chet Atkins even had the courage to sign the singer.
In the beginning, each time Charley walked out on stage to greet an audience for the first time, there would be a shocked hush followed by only polite applause. Because of RCA’s restrictive publicity technique regarding Pride, it wasn’t common knowledge that he was a black man, even after several hit songs. Only when Charley smiled and said, “I guess this isn’t exactly what you were expecting,” did the whispers cease. Then, as he took the microphone and started singing, the enthusiasm built into such a frenzy that the crowd wouldn’t let him leave the stage! By 1968, no other act could follow him. In ’69, Charley began a run of six consecutive #1 singles. Two years later, he won the Entertainer Of The Year award from the Country Music Association. The man was now the industry’s most-recognized artist.
At about the same time Pride was taking over the mantle of reigning royalty in country music, Ben Peters was taking a drive in his car. Peters was quickly becoming one of Music City’s top tunesmiths. A music veteran, he had played in rock bands as a saxophone player before joining the Navy. He tried his hand at songwriting while in the service and eventually found his way to Nashville. He worked at his craft for nearly two years before his first song was published. It was only after Peters landed a job running a small music company that things began to take off for the songwriter.
Ben and his wife had become the parents of a baby girl. They named her “Angela” and she was the most special thing in their lives. Ben couldn’t leave the house each day without kissing his daughter and saying good-bye.
As he was driving to work one morning, Peters started thinking about how blessed he was. With a beautiful wife and daughter, he couldn’t imagine himself being any happier. As he drove along thinking about all those things, he began to develop a song based around his personal feelings and emotions about life.
One of the first lines that came to Ben was “kiss an angel good morning.” After all, that was what he did each day when he picked up his daughter Angela. The song almost wrote itself from that point. Within two months of Ben’s morning drive, a demo of “Kiss An Angel Good Morning” found its way into producer Jack Clement’s hands. When Charley Pride heard it, he couldn’t wait to get into the studio to cut the song.
Pride’s positive response to the tune was based on his relationship with his wife Rozene, whom he had married in 1956. The love that Charley felt for her and for the way she had supported him through the long period of his pipe-dream of becoming a professional baseball player and the tense, early years of his country music career, were all expressed in “Kiss An Angel Good Morning.” This was the kind of positive country music that Pride wanted to continue to do. His desire would work out well for Ben Peters, as the singer would go on to cut more than 20 of Ben’s compositions with seven of them becoming major hits for Charley.
RCA released “Kiss An Angel Good Morning” in October, 1971, at about the time Pride was accepting his “Entertainer Of The Year” trophy from the Country Music Association. The record nestled into the #1 position of Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart on December 4th and stayed there for five weeks, making it one of the decade’s biggest country hits. It even placed at #21 on Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart, a surprising tally for such a country-sounding record. In a career that spanned more than 60 chart singles and 29 number one hits, “Kiss An Angel Good Morning” would become Charley Pride’s top seller and his signature song.
Perhaps no entertainer ever made a career choice that would have seemed more inappropriate than Charley Pride. His sister’s early warning of, “You’ll never make any money singing like that,” would have seemed to be very sage advice. Yet Pride ignored race and prejudice and considered only what he felt in his heart. With a strong marriage and positive outlook to anchor him, he remained true to himself and became loved, honored and revered in a world that could have closed its doors to him. Without saying anything, he opened up people’s minds and short-circuited old ideas. As the first black man to walk the country music stage as a genuine star, Charley not only represented himself and his race well, but became an icon that everyone in country music was proud to embrace. “Kiss An Angel Good Morning” stands out as Pride’s most successful hit, while Charley stands out as one of country music’s greatest acts.
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