Charley Pride has died. According to a press release from his publicist, the country legend died on Saturday (Dec. 12) in Dallas, Texas, of complications from COVID-19. He was 86 years old.
Born in Sledge, Mississippi, on March 18, 1934, Pride grew up poor as the son of a sharecropper on a cotton farm and became country music’s first Black superstar, as well as the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.
His Brother Stephen and ‘The Pridesman” opened for him when they played the South Okanagan Events Centre in Penticton where Dennis Walker interviewed him backstage.