Charley Pride Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There are worse things than being thought a Republican.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.