Charley Pride, RIP

COVID has taken another of our great country musicians, the pathbreaking Charley Pride. You can argue that Pride’s style of very smooth pop country is not the most influential today and maybe it doesn’t completely stand up to the test of time, though I think to mainstream Nashville it very much does. He’s not really my favorite artist. But as the first Black country musician in modern Nashville, Pride really broke a lot of barriers. Moreover, he was a huge hitmaker for two solid decades, so he was hardly a flash in the pan. He worked intermittently until the end, though he never had a late career renaissance like so many of our country artists since Rick Rubin brought Johnny Cash back from the artistic junkheap in the early 90s.

The vaccine cannot be mass produced quickly enough.