Country music legend Charley Pride died Saturday in Dallas of complications from COVID-19. He was 86.
In 1999, Pride told former Birmingham News reporter Bill Plott about how he was traded to the Birmingham Black Barons in 1954 in exchange for a team bus. This is the article in its entirety:
If the story’s not quite true, it ought to be because so many people have heard it and believe it: Charley Pride and a teammate were traded to the Birmingham Black Barons for a team bus.
The truth lies somewhere between there and fiction. Pride, who will sing the National Anthem next Sunday at Friends of Rickwood Field’s fourth Rickwood Classic, did indeed play for the Black Barons.
In 1954, he compiled a 4-2 record pitching for Birmingham. He also played left field.
He easily recalls a 370-foot home run he hit at Rickwood Field that season against his old team, the Memphis Red Sox.
”Oh, yeah,” said Pride in a telephone interview from Dallas, where he has lived for many years. “Ball players remember hits like golfers remember shots. Eddie Hancock was pitching for Memphis. The first time I came up I hit a major-league popup, and he laughed at me. The next time up I hit it out of there.”
In 1954, Pride said, a lot of out-of-town ball players stayed at an old hotel called the Zanzibar on Seventh Avenue North.
He said he also spent a lot of time in the Acipco area, visiting teammates who lived there.
If the team-bus story sounds like the stuff of mythology, it’s only because Pride has always generated that kind of story in music, if not baseball.
As the most successful Black artist in country and western music, there was no way he could have an ordinary baseball career.
When his first records began getting airplay, few people knew his heritage. Most did not believe it when told he was Black, prompting the story of two little old ladies in the front row at a concert. When Pride walked out on the stage, one is reported to have shrieked, “Oh, my God, he is!”
Pride takes it all in stride.
While he is unquestionably the most successful Black performer in the genre, Pride quickly acknowledges that he was not the first. He and a host of other Black C&W performers are featured on last year’s boxed set From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music.
Pride, 62, who still performs regularly, has had 29 No. 1 hits on the country charts. But before he got serious about guitars, he was extremely serious about balls, bats and gloves. He left school in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1953 to try out with the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League.
”I was somewhere between 14 and 15,” he said. “I know my mom and dad had to sign for me.”
He didn’t make the team and wound up going to Iowa to play in a semi-pro league. The salary was a percentage of the gate.
”If it didn’t rain, we could make it. If it rained, we were in trouble. It rained a lot. It would be a beautiful day and then pour at night when we were going to play. I’m not casting aspersions against the Lord, but it was like somebody had pulled a plug. We were getting hungrier and hungrier. I pulled up weeds and chewed the roots. Certain types didn’t taste too bad,” he said.
Meanwhile, white baseball was continuing to raid the Negro American League.
When Pride returned to Memphis, he was signed by the Red Sox and got into eight games.
The next year he was in Memphis briefly, then with Louisville, finally winding up in Birmingham after the legendary trade.
”I was with the Louisville Clippers, a new team in the league, and they needed money. They sold me and Jesse Mitchell, who still lives there, to the Black Barons for money to buy a team bus,” he said.
That was the only year he played in Birmingham.
From 1955 through 1958 he was back with the Memphis Red Sox with a two-year military stint in the middle.
“In ’58 I tried to get my release from Memphis because I had a chance to go with the (AAA) Denver Bears,” said Pride, adding that his relationship with the Red Sox was also strained because they wouldn’t give him a raise.
”I was pitching and playing outfield. I was playing two positions. I thought I ought to have more money,” he said.
Pride, unable to resolve the impasse with Memphis, sat out a year.
”In 1960 I answered an advertisement in The Sporting News,” said Pride.
“They were looking for ball players in Missoula, Montana. I got in good shape and mortgaged the furniture for $400. I gave my wife $200 and took off. The Missoula Timberjacks signed me, and I sent the rest of the money back to her.”
But the dream was short-lived.
As the Negro leagues declined and more Black players were added to major- and minor-league rosters, a new problem arose.
“Back then they had quotas on colored players. Most teams wouldn’t have more than one or two blacks back then,” he said.
Pride said he was quota-ed out of a position with Missoula, but the manager helped him get into a semi-pro league over in Helena. It would require getting a day job in order to play ball at night. Pride got a job in a smelter.
”I started singing up there,” he said.
“One day at the ballpark, I did the national anthem and maybe one other song (over the public address system). Then, at the end of every game we started going over to this club and I started picking and singing.”
Like most older country-and-western artists today, he finds himself shut out of radio airplay but still enormously popular on tour.
Although based in Dallas, he capitalized on the Branson, Mo., boom by signing a five-year contract with one of the theaters there.
The club since has folded, but he still plays elsewhere in Branson.
Pride said he is looking forward to the Rickwood Classic.
”I still am a good hitter. I played in an old-timers game two years ago and got two doubles. I hit one off Spaceman Bill Lee and the other off (Al) Hrabosky, the Mad Hungarian.”
Both Lee and Hrabosky are former major-league pitchers.
”I always played outfield, too,” recalled Pride, “because of my hitting. I wasn’t a great fielder, but I was no butcher. The curve ball bothered me from the right, so I became a switchhitter. My brother and I tore up Daddy’s henhouse practicing. We used it for a backstop.”
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