The legacy of Country Music’s first Black superstar

By Logan Langlois NASHVILLE, TN — The first man to win the Country Music Association’s male vocalist award two years in a row, one of the first Black members of the Grand Ole Opry, and one of the most successful country music singers ever, Charley Pride’s legacy befits legend in Music City. At the time of his death from complications from contracting COVID-19 at the age of 86, Pride would have 29 No. 1 country hits, 52 Top 10s, and twelve gold albums. Pride would see himself inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000, though his legacy of being country music’s first Black superstar lives on today.& Born to a sharecropper father as the fourth of 11 children on March 18, 1934, Pride grew up during southern segregation in a shotgun shack on a 40-acre cotton farm along the Mississippi Delta in a town named Sledge. Pride said when he was younger, he imagined himself getting off the farm; during that time he bought his first guitar and began to sing at the age of 14. He would get his first break to a better life at the age of 16 through baseball when Pride landed a...