Charley Pride Quotes

#1. A woman went so far as to hire private detectives to contact me to help bring her out of what she called a hypnotic trance.

Charley Pride

#2. I loved Mississippi and do to this day. The rainbows that stretch from horizon to horizon after a summer rain are the most spectacular I have ever seen.

Charley Pride

#3. I might have become a minor celebrity but royalty checks were a long way off.

Charley Pride

#4. After 14 months of military service, I had a wife, a child, half an apartment, no car, and no job.

Charley Pride

#5. Mother was a talkative person, and I was a lot like her.

Charley Pride

#6. For most entertainers, there is a single experience, one defining moment, when confidence replaces the self-doubt that most of us wrestle with.

Charley Pride

#7. Early in my career I began receiving letters from a woman in the Midwest who claimed to be my mother.

Charley Pride

#8. I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.

Charley Pride

#9. I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.

Charley Pride

#10. I realize I was more of a curiosity to the older Nashville artists than the new ones.

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#11. Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing.

Charley Pride

#12. No one church has all the answers or the perfect map to the Promised Land, and I prefer to work out my own faith and my own convictions in the seclusion of my own mind.

Charley Pride

#13. What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.

Charley Pride

#14. Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did.

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#15. What qualifies me to tell people how to act or what to think? I'm Charley Pride, country singer. Period.

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#16. It was unlikely that anyone had ever heard a black person sing country music.

Charley Pride

#17. When I came up, there was room for the new and the old. For every new artist, an old one didn't have to be pushed out.

Charley Pride

#18. As far back as I can remember, the radio held a special fascination for me.

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#19. People pay attention to lyrics, and the race matter was delicate.

Charley Pride

#20. Redd Foxx was the same gruff old codger you saw on television.

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#21. A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.

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#22. Flying was as necessary to my business as fiddles and footlights.

Charley Pride

#23. I finally came to terms with manic depression and lithium. I've taken lithium regularly for the past few years and have had no further bouts with manic depression.

Charley Pride

#24. How often does a guy who lives and breathes baseball meet a woman who loves the game and understands it as well as he?

Charley Pride

#25. Too many religious organizations are in the business of enforcing beliefs.

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#26. Fans will praise you, scold you, and offer helpful advice. Fans will also defend you.

Charley Pride

#27. Not only are three-putt greens probable, at times they are an achievment.

Charley Pride

#28. I don't care what the religion is called; as far as I'm concerned, one God, the God I adhere to, is in charge of all of them.

Charley Pride

#29. Besides good schools, a good airport, and the Cowboys, Dallas had golf courses, and golf was fast becoming an obsession with me.

Charley Pride

#30. A fan will grab you and hug you and will not let go. When that happens, you wish it could be that way all over the world.

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#31. The time I spent thinking about how I was better than somebody else or worrying about somebody else's attitude was time I could put to better use.

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#32. Even now, when I'm asked how I'm doing, I like to reply, 'Pretty good. I've got all my fingers and both eyes.

Charley Pride

#33. I'm not James Brown. I'm not Sam Cooke. I'm Charley Pride. I'm just me and that's what you got.

Charley Pride

#34. I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well.

Charley Pride

#35. Johnny Duncan was one of the first opening acts I hired for my show, and he is the one who initiated me into astrology. I got hooked. It made a lot of sense to me.

Charley Pride

#36. Baseball got into my blood early and I worked harder at it than anything.

Charley Pride

#37. In 20 years I had sold more records for RCA than any artist except Elvis Presley.

Charley Pride

#38. I try to keep my feet on the ground. Even though I appreciate the fame and adoration, I remember once I used to pick cotton, and I felt like even then I was somebody. I have the same feet, hands and heart like everyone else. I'm just also blessed with a good voice.

Charley Pride

#39. It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.

Charley Pride

#40. I've tried to help a lot of young artists get started.

Charley Pride

#41. There were very few black people in Montana but we never felt out of place.

Charley Pride

#42. Chet Atkins ... is probably the best guitar player who ever lived.

Charley Pride

#43. It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.

Charley Pride

#44. I believe it is possible to tell what sign some people were born under by watching their eyes, watching how they walk, how they talk.

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#45. Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.

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#46. There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.

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#47. There were no guarantees that country music, whose roots were in the South, were ready for Charley Pride.

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#48. I was sometimes jeered by black soldiers who wanted me to sing something besides country music.

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#49. There only have been two people on this earth that I was nervous around: Chet Atkins and Mickey Mantle. It's because of the respect I have for them.

Charley Pride

#50. A lot of celebrities relish politics and are eager to lend their names to candidates and causes. I never wanted to be a spokesman for anybody.

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#51. Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting.

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#52. I've seen people who have been coming to my shows for 25 years.

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#53. I began playing Branson during the 1992 season and was a little amazed. There were about 30 celebrity theatres there and more are being added all the time.

Charley Pride

#54. Singing as a full-time job was not something I had given a lot of thought to and I had no clear notion of the money to be made in it.

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#55. If Detroit was a watershed concert for me, traveling with Willie Nelson through Texas and Louisiana was a milestone of a different sort.

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#56. I think there's enough room in country music for everybody.

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#57. No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.

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#58. The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.

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#59. My brothers and sisters all sang, too, and they all have good voices.

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#60. Any entertainer who tells you that the adoration of fans is not a heady experience probably never had the experience.

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#61. I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.

Charley Pride