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some things about charley pride: listen to this, one of his greatest performances , a classic uptempo bluegrass waltz,
2) there is something in the grain of Pride's voice that is errant, fugitive, uncaptured by the Nashville vernacular... but it is an assertion of belonging, an insistent refusal of some marked difference that would allow him to be
3) another Grand Old Opry novelty, and also a refusal of being some kind of inverted Elvis... and that radical gesture of creating a new sonic community in which these are just the songs that Charley Pride likes to sing...
4) in a country whose military had segregated its blood supply not 20 years earlier... it's a kind of aesthetic praxis that really has to be seen as fantastically subversive, especially because the register in which 60s country circulated...
5) which is to say--LPs and, mostly, radio--did not allow for "verification" of the singer's race (this is a reality at which O, Brother, Where Art Thou? hinted, but couldn't quite carry through, because the music communities of the 1930s were, in fact, segregated
6) in ways that the music of the US South in the 1960s wasn't... It's important to get the periodization correct, here... this is not an analysis that would help us make much sense of the music of the 1950s, nor of the 1970s--60s country music is a very unique
7) partition of the sensible, coextensive with changes in the material and social conditions of everyday life in the US South that we likely have an easier time calling to mind...
8) there is a link between changes in radio station property ownership and broadcasting power, and the final spasms of Jim Crow in the South, and the birth of multitracked stereo recording, and the legal substructure of the music industry...
9) and this created an opening for the sort of ordinary miracle that was the broadcast of a Charley Pride concert on radio... what was this voice? to ears of Souther white proletarians? who came, in large numbers to worship Charley Pride?
10) there was obviously a kind of surface kitsch liberalism, a "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" sort of coding to Pride's public persona, but, like Poitier, Pride was able to do all sorts of wonderfully strange things under the cover of that exterior...
11) which, nevertheless, exacted a huge cost on Pride himself--this non-disclosable open secret at the core of his musical identity--at least as far as we can glean from Pride's autobiography...
12) which has some poignant passages about his struggles with anxiety attacks, fear of flying, etc... when I was reading his autobiography in a directed reading of country autobiographies, I remember reading those chapters...
13) at the same time as George Jones's--they were friends and the sounds of their bands in the 1960s was very close--where Jones, who loved Pride, but was also a sociopath, remembers pranking Pride by vandalizing their car with "KKK" graffiti over night at the motel...
14) anyways, there is an incredible moment during the In Person: Live At Panther Hall lp, where Pride addresses the fact that attendees at his concerts (all white, one assumes, in Dallas, TX, in 1967?) were there, in part, to verify, if it could be real,
15) that Pride was really Black? which would mean, what, one imagines, in regard to the question of whether they were really white? It's a small opening, a crease, it didn't prevent the horrors we're living through today, which doesn't mean that it didn't matter...
16) or that we can ever really separate what happens on the sonic register, in the domain of timbre and noise, from politics... nor can we say that an artist's importance lies, ultimately, in what they "express"
17) insofar as "what they 'express'" names a straightforward transmission of some message, testimony, or story... after all, Pride mostly sang songs that other people sang... Bill Monroe's "Good Woman's Love" or Hank Williams's "Kaw-Liga"
18) He chose to sing those songs! And not others. In any event, rest in power, Charley Pride, and may his memory be a blessing. <3
