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Dallas singer Charley Pride, the 'Jackie Robinson of country,’ to be honored at CMA Awards

Pride will join Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and others greats as a CMA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.

After all he’s been through, 86-year-old Charley Pride isn’t going to let a pandemic stop him from collecting the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award in person Wednesday night at the Country Music Association Awards.

The Dallas-based singer — dubbed “the Jackie Robinson of country music” for breaking the genre’s color line during the Civil Rights era — will pick up the trophy and perform at a smaller, socially-distanced version of the CMAs in Nashville. In a statement, Pride said he was “honored and proud” to receive the award.

Rather than stage the show in front of a huge audience at Bridgestone Arena, the usual site, organizers have scaled it back and moved it to the Music City Center convention hall, where Pride and other artists will sit at tables spread apart from each other.

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Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line and singer Lee Brice dropped out of the event in recent days after testing positive for COVID-19. CMA officials released a statement saying those cancellations “reassure us that our protocols are working. We have been extremely diligent with our testing process … every single person has been tested, and many will be tested repeatedly throughout the week.”

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Pride is the sixth artist to win the Lifetime Achievement Award since the honor was created in 2012, putting him in good company with Nelson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson and Kenny Rogers. He’s a multiple CMA award winner, including for Entertainer of the Year in 1971, the first and only time a Black artist has taken home that trophy.

“Charley Pride is the epitome of a trailblazer,” CMA CEO Sarah Trahern said in a statement. “Few other artists have grown country music’s rich heritage and led to the advancement of country music around the world like Charley.”

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Born in 1934 in Sledge, Miss., Pride started singing as a child. But his first true love was baseball.

He joined the Negro Leagues in the 1950s and even tried out for the majors. However, when injuries cut his career short, he began singing in nightclubs around Montana. In 1965, RCA honcho Chet Atkins took one listen to his velvet baritone and handed him a contract.

By 1966, he earned a Grammy nod for “Just Between You and Me” and began a 20-year reign as one of country’s music’s top stars. He scored hit after hit, from the reggae-style “You’re My Jamaica” to “Let Me Live,” which won the 1971 Grammy for gospel performance.

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In 1969, Pride and his wife, Rozene, moved from Montana to Dallas, partly because it seemed less prejudiced than other parts of the South, he told The Dallas Morning News in 2017.

“I grew up in a segregated society, and I didn’t want to subject my three kids to that. We picked out what we thought was the best place for the kids, and also for traveling around the world, and you couldn’t find a better place for that than Dallas.”

In interviews, Pride usually downplays any racism he felt in his career. But he admits that some people pigeonholed him as a novelty act. In a 2017 interview with NPR, he recalled one Nashville music exec telling him “You look like them, but you sound like us.”

In reality, Pride’s deep, smooth voice is in a class all its own.

“The fact is, he sang it so much better than so many of the good country artists were [singing] at the time,” Dolly Parton said in I’m Just Me, a 2019 PBS documentary about Pride. That same year, Ken Burns featured him prominently in the documentary miniseries Country Music.

In 1975, Pride became the first Black artist to co-host the CMAs. On Wednesday, Darius Rucker will become the second, making Pride’s Lifetime Achievement Award all the more special.

“I don’t know who’s going to present it to him, but I know that I will be standing on the side of the stage watching that with the rest of the world,” Rucker, a lifelong fan, told the Tennessean. “I don’t think Charley, still to this day, gets enough credit.”