Charley Pride – Rca Country Legends

The same racial politics that make Charley Pride an important figure make it difficult to hear him dispassionately. Alas, we probably want him to have left a more distinctive imprint on the music than he did. Charlie Rich could be forgiven the pop schlock of “The Most Beautiful Girl” because it takes only a cursory tour through his varied catalogue to reveal far more compelling vocals (and material). Placed in similar context, Charley Pride’s signature hit, “Kiss An Angel Good Mornin'”, seems a more accurate indicator of his strengths and weaknesses.

Hey, good schlock is good schlock. It’s a cheap shot, perhaps, but Pride seems an almost colorless vocalist, a crooner in the style of Eddy Arnold or Jim Reeves, though in neither’s league. There may have been plenty of good reasons why country music’s only real black star would have chosen to sound as bland as possible, or maybe that’s just how songs came out of his mouth. It’s a puzzling legacy either way.

This collection of 16 RCA sides — the hits leavened by his first single, “Snakes Crawl At Night” — is a fair summary of a successful, commercial country singer’s career (ending with his last #1, 1981’s cover of the 1963 David Houston hit “Mountain Of Love”). But it doesn’t quite argue for immortality.

It could have been a more interesting career, perhaps. “Snakes Crawl At Night”, which flopped, is the kind of song a young Johnny Paycheck loved to cut. That impulse passed soon enough. Pride’s almost courtly live show, as captured on the 1968 In Person (reissued in 1998 by Koch), suggests he sought the cool sophistication of a sober Frank Sinatra.

Then why sing “Mississippi Cotton-Pickin’ Delta Town” and so many similarly themed pieces? The effort to bring upper middle-class elegance to the working-class songs that were still at the center of country music in the 1960s seems, from this distance, misguided. “Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger” — nothing like Buddy Miller’s “Does My Ring Burn Your Finger” — is a cuckold’s song, but Pride so deeply submerges the husband’s anger as to make it almost tragi-comic.

Or compare, for example, Pride’s take on the Harlan Howard classic, “Busted” (with a weirdly happy fiddle setting the tone) to the Johnny Cash version. Or “Honky Tonk Blues” to the Hank Williams original. True enough, both are powerful stylists, but the contrast suggests just how little emotion Pride invested in his material. He’s much better when he’s removed from that social milieu, as on “Wonder Could I Live There Anymore”, on which his warm, detached vocals seem right at home.