Charlie Pride

[kyonggimike]

I was a bit surprised to hear Charlie say in the interview with Jack Clement (which was at least an hour too short!) that Charlie Pride was hardly known in the UK. I remember that he had a huge following there in the 1970s, and toured at least a couple of times. I would guess that his classic song "Crystal Chandelier" might well have been the most played country record of that decade. People like Charlie Pride were popular, but maybe among the "wrong" kind of people. Country music was seriously unfashionable at that time: I recall even the naff Radio 1 djs like Tony Blackburn would feel obliged to put on a sneering yee-haw acccent when a country song occasionally made the playlist.

Charlie Pride was also immortalized by Steve Goodman (Wasn't he once a guest on "Honky-tonk"?) in his song "You Never Even Call Me By My Name":
You don't have to call me Waylon Jennings
And you don't have to call me Charlie Pride
And you don't have to call me Merle Haggard...anymore
Even though you're on my fightin' side.

[davidt]

Steve Goodman played live on Honky Tonk on 25 July 1976 on his way to Cambridge Folk Festival. I still have a tape of the whole show and a few other HTs of that era.