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

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

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

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

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

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

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