His father intended to name him Charl Frank Pride, but due to a clerical error on his birth certificate, his legal name became Charley.

He grew up with 10 siblings in a three-room house in the delta town of Sledge, Mississippi. His sharecropper parents taught him to be grateful for what he had.

His third single, "Just Between You and Me" reached number nine on the U.S. country chart and earned Charley his first Grammy Award nomination.

Charley bought his first guitar from the Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue when he was fourteen and taught himself to play by listening to the radio.

While playing in the Negro Leagues with the Louisville Clippers, Pride and Jesse Mitchell were traded to the Birmingham Black Barons for a team bus. In his 1994 autobiography, Pride mused, "Jesse and I may have the distinction of being the only players in history to be traded for a used motor vehicle."

"The way I feel is a dog-gone pity
Teardrops are fallin' down the mountainside
Many times I've been here and many times I cried
We used to be so happy, when we were in love
High on a mountain of love"

Pride's baseball career was interrupted in 1956 when he was drafted by Uncle Sam and ordered to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas for basic training. The fort's baseball squad was stacked with talent in 1957 and won the "All Army" sports championship at a tournament at Ft. Knox. In addition to Pride, the team included several other players who had been playing or would go on to play professionally.

After work, Charley played at various saloons and pubs, frequently solo, and other times as part of a four-piece combo called the Night Hawks.

In 1966, newly signed to Nashville's RCA label, Pride released "The Snakes Crawl at Night", a chilling Mel Tillis tune about a man who watches from the shadows as his wife and another man carry on an affair, then takes deadly revenge on both of them. The song was probably a bit too intense for country listeners and failed to chart.

"I see other pretty women,
An' Lord, they still, they look good to me.
An' there are some ladies that can drive some men mad.
But when an angel let's her hair down,
Oh, that's something else to see.
An' I say, mmm mmm, you're so good when you're bad."