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

A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.

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

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.

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

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