Charley Pride Quotes

For most entertainers, there is a single experience, one defining moment, when confidence replaces the self-doubt that most of us wrestle with.

No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.

I try to keep my feet on the ground. Even though I appreciate the fame and adoration, I remember once I used to pick cotton, and I felt like even then I was somebody. I have the same feet, hands and heart like everyone else. I'm just also blessed with a good voice.

The time I spent thinking about how I was better than somebody else or worrying about somebody else's attitude was time I could put to better use.

A fan will grab you and hug you and will not let go. When that happens, you wish it could be that way all over the world.

I think there's enough room in country music for everybody.

There only have been two people on this earth that I was nervous around: Chet Atkins and Mickey Mantle. It's because of the respect I have for them.

Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.

I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.

What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.

It was unlikely that anyone had ever heard a black person sing country music.

There are worse things than being thought a Republican.

It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.

I'm not James Brown. I'm not Sam Cooke. I'm Charley Pride. I'm just me and that's what you got.

Too many religious organizations are in the business of enforcing beliefs.

Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing.

What qualifies me to tell people how to act or what to think? I'm Charley Pride, country singer. Period.

I don't care what the religion is called; as far as I'm concerned, one God, the God I adhere to, is in charge of all of them.

If Detroit was a watershed concert for me, traveling with Willie Nelson through Texas and Louisiana was a milestone of a different sort.

Early in my career I began receiving letters from a woman in the Midwest who claimed to be my mother.

The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.

There were no guarantees that country music, whose roots were in the South, were ready for Charley Pride.

Baseball got into my blood early and I worked harder at it than anything.

No one church has all the answers or the perfect map to the Promised Land, and I prefer to work out my own faith and my own convictions in the seclusion of my own mind.

I loved Mississippi and do to this day. The rainbows that stretch from horizon to horizon after a summer rain are the most spectacular I have ever seen.