Quotes by Charley Pride

• There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.
• Too many religious organizations are in the business of enforcing beliefs.
• Until MTV, television had not been a huge influence on music. To compete with MTV, the country music moguls felt they had to appeal to the same young audience and do it the way MTV did.
• What qualifies me to tell people how to act or what to think? I'm Charley Pride, country singer. Period.
• When I came up, there was room for the new and the old. For every new artist, an old one didn't have to be pushed out.
• The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.
• 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.
• I think there's enough room in country music for everybody.
• A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.
• 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.
• Any entertainer who tells you that the adoration of fans is not a heady experience probably never had the experience.
• Chet Atkins... is probably the best guitar player who ever lived.
• Even now, when I'm asked how I'm doing, I like to reply, 'Pretty good. I've got all my fingers and both eyes.
• Fans are what make a performer and I've always taken them seriously.
• Fans will praise you, scold you, and offer helpful advice. Fans will also defend you.
• For most entertainers, there is a single experience, one defining moment, when confidence replaces the self-doubt that most of us wrestle with.
• 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.
• There are worse things than being thought a Republican.
• I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well.
• 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.
• I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.
• I've tried to help a lot of young artists get started.
• In 20 years I had sold more records for RCA than any artist except Elvis Presley.
• It isn't reasonable to expect that everyone in the world is a country music fan. Not yet, anyway.
• It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.
• 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.
• Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting.
• Performing is an experience, for me, that is as humbling as it is energizing.
• Redd Foxx was the same gruff old codger you saw on television.
• Singing as a full-time job was not something I had given a lot of thought to and I had no clear notion of the money to be made in it.
• I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.