Grand Ole Opry, a popular radio show broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, featuring a selection of country singers.
As a child Charley sang the songs he learned off the radio and, at the age of 14, bought a guitar. Though he was complimented for his voice, he discounted the possibility that a black man would be welcomed into what was then considered white people’s music.
Baseball looked like a more promising escape route from sharecropping, and in 1952 he was signed by the Memphis Red Sox, of the Negro American League, as a pitcher.
Pride met his wife Rozene Cohran, a cosmetologist, in Memphis and they married just as he was drafted into the US army in 1956.