Country Music’s First Black Superstar Charley Pride Dies at 86 of COVID-19

Charley Pride, country music’s Black superstar, died Saturday of COVID-19. He was 86. Pride was country music’s first bona fide Black star, notching 29 No. 1 singles on the country music charts between 1969 and 1983 like “All I Have to Offer You (Is Me),” “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’,” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone?” He won the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year award in 1971 and took home four Grammys throughout his life. He was also a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry, country music’s premier venue in Nashville. Born into a sharecropping family in 1934, he purchased his first guitar with money earned from picking cotton while a teenager. Dolly Parton wrote in a tribute to Pride, “I’m so heartbroken that one of my dearest and oldest friends, Charley Pride, has passed away. It’s even worse to know that he passed away from COVID-19. What a horrible, horrible virus. Charley, we will always love you.”