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

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

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.

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

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.

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.