Charley Pride quotes:

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

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

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

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

I grew up not liking my father very much. I never saw him cry. But he must have. Everybody cries.

Besides good schools, a good airport, and the Cowboys, Dallas had golf courses, and golf was fast becoming an obsession with me.

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've tried to help a lot of young artists get started.

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.

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

I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.

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.

Mother was a talkative person, and I was a lot like her.

Any entertainer who tells you that the adoration of fans is not a heady experience probably never had the experience.

I finally came to terms with manic depression and lithium. I've taken lithium regularly for the past few years and have had no further bouts with manic depression.

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.

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.

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.

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

Fans will praise you, scold you, and offer helpful advice. Fans will also defend you.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well.

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.

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

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.

A woman went so far as to hire private detectives to contact me to help bring her out of what she called a hypnotic trance.

There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.

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.

Once your name becomes well known, politicians come courting.

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.

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.

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

How often does a guy who lives and breathes baseball meet a woman who loves the game and understands it as well as he?

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

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

Redd Foxx was the same gruff old codger you saw on television.

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

In 20 years I had sold more records for RCA than any artist except Elvis Presley.

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.

My brothers and sisters all sang, too, and they all have good voices.

Johnny Duncan was one of the first opening acts I hired for my show, and he is the one who initiated me into astrology. I got hooked. It made a lot of sense to me.

I might have become a minor celebrity but royalty checks were a long way off.

I realize I was more of a curiosity to the older Nashville artists than the new ones.

I was sometimes jeered by black soldiers who wanted me to sing something besides country music.

Chet Atkins... is probably the best guitar player who ever lived.

Not only are three-putt greens probable, at times they are an achievment.

I began playing Branson during the 1992 season and was a little amazed. There were about 30 celebrity theatres there and more are being added all the time.

A lot of celebrities relish politics and are eager to lend their names to candidates and causes. I never wanted to be a spokesman for anybody.

People pay attention to lyrics, and the race matter was delicate.

There are worse things than being thought a Republican.

There were very few black people in Montana but we never felt out of place.

After 14 months of military service, I had a wife, a child, half an apartment, no car, and no job.

As far back as I can remember, the radio held a special fascination for me.

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

I've seen people who have been coming to my shows for 25 years.

Flying was as necessary to my business as fiddles and footlights.

I believe it is possible to tell what sign some people were born under by watching their eyes, watching how they walk, how they talk.